What really happens to your clothes at the dry cleaners?

It's really quite awful. Your clothes are dumped — along with everyone else's dirty things — into a giant machine full of perchloroethylene, which should be banned and will be banned within the next decade.

The real solution, in my opinion, is to move beyond clothes that need to be dry cleaned. Wouldn't it be funny, if — all these years after we baby boomers decided we had to hate polyester suits — we embraced them — and for just about the same reason we hated them: devotion to the natural?

Do you know the movie "The Man in the White Suit"?

Sidney Stratton, a brilliant young research chemist and former Cambridge scholarship recipient, has been dismissed from jobs at several textile mills because of his demands for expensive facilities and his obsession to invent a long-lasting fibre. Whilst working as a labourer at the Birnley mill, he accidentally becomes an unpaid researcher and invents an incredibly strong fibre which repels dirt and never wears out...

Stratton is lauded as a genius until both management and the trade unions realise the consequence of his invention—once consumers have purchased enough cloth, demand will drop precipitously and put the textile industry out of business.....

The evil business owners want to suppress this invention, of course. Anyway. I remember watching this movie in the 1970s — when polyester suit hatred reached its height among us natural-fiber-loving post-hippies.  The movie was made in 1951, and we were amused by the way the film-makers did not anticipate the horror of polyester.

We experienced our enlightened perceptions 2 decades after the movie came out, and now, here we are, after 4 more decades. Perhaps we should get back on the track we retreated from so we can find our way out of the bondage of dry cleaning.