Once upon a time, our homes had the weekly visit of the good old dhobi! Almost every family had a loyal dhobi who would come on a fixed day of the week carrying the freshly laundered clothes of the family… and the lady of the house would open her diary and make sure all the clothes given the previous week were back now, ready to be worn …! Then a new bunch of clothes and linen would be handed over to the dhobi after making due entry in the diary of what all was going out for laundry… how many bed sheets…, how many shirts…, and how many towels, etc., etc.… and payment was always made depending on number of clothes the dhobi carried in his laundry bag !
Of course small little things like pillow covers and handkerchiefs were always not counted…, meaning no extra payments for these small items which were meant to tag along with the main bundle of clothes!
The dhobi system worked most efficiently and clothes from various households rarely ever got mixed up due to a small marking system… like a small dot or a star… in one tiny almost invisible corner of the item to be laundered… and this mark identified the household to which the item belonged.
I grew up watching my mother’s weekly meetings with the dhobi who serviced our family for a number of years… and when I joined the garment industry where care instructions meant putting the garments through a number of lab tests…, I often wondered what precautions our dhobi used to take… Because the clothes he laundered for our family always came back fresh and crisp…, no shrinkages…. no colour loss…, surprisingly even the whites also looked the same original white…, may be whiter due to the likely use of bleach during washing!
But the fact of the matter was that it was the dhobi who decided what care instruction should apply where…, and it worked like magic!
As I sat down to write this story after a recent conversation with a buyer to decide the care instructions on a style going into production…, I suddenly remembered our family dhobi who never went to any fashion institute to learn the different intricacies of count and construction of a particular fabric…, nor the various methods of how fabrics were dyed and never knew the meaning of crocking and its various parameters…! And yet almost always gave a brilliant performance on the laundry he did. Was it because all the washing was hand done…, line dried? No exposures to any degree of temperatures in a tumbler? or was it simply because for the dhobi this was not only an occupation to earn a living but something he did with a passion using his sense of judgement and caring deeply for each garment that passed thru his hands!
Fast forward to care instructions on the garments we export today and how specialized the world of testing has become. It is the lab which recommends how a customer should wash the garment he or she picks from a particular store. Hence it becomes a store’s responsibility to make sure that the correct care instructions have been put on the wash care label. And of course each buyer maintains a manual with a long list of testing standards and guidelines which the approved lab must follow while doing fabric performance test (FPT) and also the garment performance test (GPT)… terminologies all of us in this industry are so well versed with.
During one such meeting…one of our buyers was very concerned about care instructions to be used on a beaded garment where the fabric was a table print from Jodhpur and not a Mill printed fabric. To make things worse it was a Khari gold print in dark colours and the styling did not end there… since beads and sequences needed to be added forming a design layout and not random beading!
Of course all this was high fashion need of the time and surely production was possible for a garment like this. But the big concern was… what care instructions should be used…? Dry clean only seemed the best solution but this was one care label which might make a customer hesitate to buy something where the wash and maintenance of the garment would be something as costly as a dry clean only instruction! The lab wanted to know whether they should recommend a wash care… or should they test the garment based on a care instruction recommended by us? We went through various recommendations with the buyer starting from hand wash line dry… to turn inside out and machine wash soft tumble dry… to do not iron on print and embellishments… and a host of other permutations and combinations of washing and drying the garment.
Till the buyer suddenly gave a big smile and said…well… if I was using this garment, I would simply leave it to my wife to decide how to wash a garment like this!! She will know better than what any care instruction label would ask her to do…
This led to smiles all around in the meeting room as we laughed aloud and shared with our buyer the dhobi story… and how it worked so well in times gone by!
We jokingly speculated why the dhobi got it right every time…, was it the fact that laundry was the livelihood for the dhobi hence led to a passion to cultivate the expertise of applying the correct care instruction on every garment?
Or, may be… the dhobin …that is dhobi’s wife… was actually behind the success of all those myriads of garments which went thru weekly washing cycles with almost a 100% success rate…
Of course finally the lab decided what care instructions should be used… but our buyer got so interested in the dhobi method of laundry that he wanted to meet one to understand this expertise… and we did manage to search all over Delhi and finally take him to a dhobighat along the Yamuna river where he was totally fascinated to watch the dhobi and his clan washing the clothes by the side of the river without following any of the guidelines from any buyers manual…!
