I spend hours making sure nothing I  wear looks too new and yet looks smart and not scruffy, clean  but not pristine,  worn but not worn out, relaxed but not uncaring, etc etc.

Its a hard life.

I have a few 50s madras jackets with some moth pinholes around the shoulders and it's hardly noticable but just looks well worn. My favorite Pendleton shawl collar bathrobe has been chewed up at the hem pretty badly too, but I still wear it every day without second thought! For a guy with a closet full of vintage wools, moths are my worst nightmare but I can still stand a bit of wear and tear.

Last edited by Oliver (2013-08-01 08:44:00)

Last edited by stanshall (2013-08-02 14:53:55)

mothball your closets?  freeze all your woolens for a few days?  rent a commercial deep freeze or a meat truck for a week or a month?  all of the above?

don't let the moths win, send the holey pants out for reweaving .....

good luck, chin up, maybe something in this article will help:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/garden/28fix.html

Bastard moths!  Sorry to see that.

Phew, that's promising! Was it as large a hole or tear as mine and was it really expensive?

Darcy's seamstress used to do it all on the cuff, I guess because she gave her a lot of business. I never brought anything in for seam work on my own. Luckily, this is a really dark brown herringbone and it's in a place *most people won't be staring at (*unless I'm partying with thee captain!) so it should work out. Still sucks though!

I'm working my way through the remaining 25% of my closet... so far so good, but I've got some old heavy flannel shirts and robes that I'm dreading pulling down! I think all my other suits and jackets are safe though.

Oliver, I'm pretty sure I heard that adult moths actually aren't the ones that eat clothes. They find a nice tweed jacket or something to lay their eggs in and the larvae chew through the wool when they hatch. So I bet that moth laid some eggs but if it was already dead and there were no other signs, then maybe it only got to the one pair of trousers and the babies are (hopefully) long gone!

Going back to the original discussion, someone mentioned something about 99.9% of people thinking you just had holy clothes. I'd actually wager that the real number is a lot smaller than that. Unless the holes are egregiously huge and/or in quite a conspicuous location, I bet most people wouldn't even notice.

I think the authentic look is one of apathy when concerning moth holes. A typical, real college student (speaking as a contemporary one) doesn't concern himself with moth holes. He doesn't notice them and he doesn't have elaborate methods of preventing them. A kid at an Ivy League school in the golden age knew what to wear and how to wear it, but I feel like most didn't spend time to meticulously care for their daily clothes. That's the essence of the lived-in, devil-may-care nature of the Ivy League "uniform." With that in mind, the Ivy League student, when confronted with moth holes (or any holes, for that matter), would most likely either not notice or not care, at least until the clothing became entirely unwearable.

Whether we continue this practice today is up to us as individuals. I thrifted a nice heavy PRL sport coat a month or so ago. I later noticed a small moth hole on the sleeve. The jacket is a dark brown so I got some brown thread and sewed the hole up. For a $10 jacket, that's about as much as I'm willing to put into repairing it. I imagine a Yalie in the sixties might respond in a similar way.

Now, if you have a job that requires a jacket and tie, there's probably a less room for the "creativity" of damaged clothing than there is for a student or someone else wearing the style casually.

Moths eating Madras fancied an Indian.

http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/pcmoths_beetles.htm