Clothes call

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2001 | 8:45 a.m.

Your pants.

There are no other pair like them, so it seems. One hundred percent rayon, flair cut, a hard-to-come-by shade of blue.

No matter how many times you hit the mall you can't find another pair that you love so much, that fit so well.

But they're dry-clean only, which means occasionally letting go, entrusting them into someone's care for an afternoon or a couple of days, along with a handful of shirts and other less-favorable pants.

You can only pray that they'll be there waiting for you, folded neatly under a fresh sheet of plastic when you go for the pick up.

For many, it truly has come to this.

Dry cleaning worldwide is a multibillion-dollar industry. Department stores are flooded with dry-clean only garments, specially woven and dyed fabrics that will shrill at the sight of water.

And for your convenience, there are 35,000 dry cleaning establishments in the United States to choose from.

In Las Vegas there are nearly 200 plopped on corners and lodged in strip malls.

Although this makes up less than 1 percent of the whole, Las Vegas is bustling daily with tens of thousands of shirts, pants, evening gowns, bridal dresses, costumes, undergarments and suits are being dropped off, tagged, treated, steamed, cleaned and picked up.

Al Phillips the Cleaner, the largest chain in Las Vegas, known for its extended hours of operation and massive drive-through service, cleans roughly 5.5 million garments each year, including uniforms worn by hotel employees.

The businesses' industrial aquariums, with large glass windows exposing its innards, can be seen glowing during the day and into the evening hours. Inside, a handful of workers are laboring away, sorting, hanging, steaming and inspecting.

"It's not a glamorous business," Stephen Mailloux, regional manager for Al Phillips the Cleaner, said. "You're a necessary evil."

Cleaning evolution

Dry cleaning started as an accident.

Somewhere in the middle of the 19th century in France, kerosene was unintentionally spilled on a stained garment within the vicinity of Frenchman Jean Baptiste Jolly-Belin (or by Jolly-Belin himself, depending on the source of the tale).

It wasn't long before the business of cleaning clothes with petroleum-based substances began. A fire hazard, cleaners were set up on the outskirts of town.

Today perchloroethylene, a gem of a chemical when it comes to releasing dirt and grease (in a nonflammable way) from colorful chiffon dresses, wool suits and silk shirts, is the hero among stain removal.

It's also a potential human carcinogen, and for nearly 10 years the Environmental Protection Agency has been working with the dry-cleaning industry and public interest groups to find ways to reduce exposure to perchloroethylene -- also known as perc -- and to find other alternatives to use for cleaning garments.

The solvent may someday lose its glory to safer solutions, but today 80 to 90 percent of dry cleaners in the United States use perchloroethylene.

While you're at work, running errands or having lunch, your fancy duds are mingling with other people's laundry, swimming in perc and unknowingly participating in controversial health issues.

The cleaning skinny

Ask someone about perc or dry cleaning in general and you are likely to be grateful that you actually attended your college chemistry classes: chemicals, evaporation rates, vapors, coolants and denaturing of substances are all components of dry cleaning.

"Dry cleaning uses a volatile solvent that carries no moisture," Mailloux said while squeezing solvent from a plastic bottle on his hand and watching it evaporate in an attempt to explain the age-old question: Why is it called dry cleaning?

"The difference between wet and dry is the ability to evaporate at a certain rate," he said.

But before a garment even enters a dry-cleaning machine it is sorted by color and texture, treated for stains, buttons are removed and precautions are taken.

"There are a lot of nuances," Mailloux said. "All these odd colors that make up the nice looking garment don't always hold up in dry cleaning.

"A lot of ladies' items will have rhinestones on them or rubies," he said. "The care label refers to the fabric, not the trim. That's where the dry cleaner has to use common sense, good old industry knowledge and even some testing."

Chemicals are used to remove any stains, may they be protein stains, such as blood, milk, egg and perspiration, or plant-based stains, such as grass, mustard and beverages.

The chemicals are squirted onto the soiled areas, flushed out with steam while being vacuum-sucked from the other side of the garment, which is flattened on a perforated board.

The garment is then ready to enter the dry-to-dry cleaning machine, which treats and dries the garment within an encased setting. This prevents perc from getting into the air, as required by the government.

Spinning at 1,725 revolutions per minute, the machine is constantly recycling the solvent by filtering out lints, dirts, dyes and greases. Any emitted vapors travel up a pipe, hit a cold coil, turn back into liquid and enter another tank where the water -- humidity from the fabric -- is separated out, and the solvent returns to the cycle.

Waste left over from the purification is transferred (over a period of time depending on the load sizes) into 15-gallon transport drums, and then taken to a disposal facility.

Meanwhile the processed garment has been taken out of the cleaning machine and is on its way to the line of steamers where it will be finished, hung on a hanger and then sent to inspection, where it's looked over for lint, wrinkles or anything incongruent with freshly cleaned garments.

"Our business is to return it to you in as-good-as-new condition as possible," Mailloux said.

Ninety-nine percent of the time garments will travel through unaffected, he said. "Nothing's ever perfect. Everything fades over time."

Social stratas

"Dry cleaners are driven by business and demographics," Mailloux said. "Dry cleaning basically is use of disposable income. It just depends on the area. Certainly Spanish Trails is an affluent dry-cleaning market."

On Bonanza Road and Eastern Avenue, he said, "You'll find you'll get more blue-collar traffic: jeans, dockers, polo shirts, and everyone looking for the best deal possible."

For higher-end garments, such as Armani suits, Versace dresses and Siegfried & Roy costumes, there's Ritz Cleaners. Located near the corner of West Tropicana Avenue and South Jones Boulevard, Ritz Cleaners is the shi-shi of stain removal.

"We do the very delicate (fabrics) nobody wants to do," Richard Amar, owner of Ritz Cleaners, said. "A lot of hand-sewn silk. We do everything one piece at a time. I baby-sit it."

"(Banana leaf fabric) is very, very delicate," he said. "Versace -- the bright colors. Can you imagine what would happen if I didn't know what I was doing? You've got to know your chemistry. That's all."

Amar said he cleans for celebrities and casino executives, "the people who aren't going to send their $300 to $400 shirts to a 99-cent cleaner."

Andrew Leary, manager at Super Cleaners III, formerly known as Modern Cleaners on Gass Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South, cleans the business suits worn by attorneys litigating in the downtown area and the brides marrying at the surrounding wedding chapels.

"Suits, they come in 100 a day," Leary said. "It's mostly city workers -- a lot of lawyers. Lots. But 80 percent is city workers."

In the summer bridal dresses come in by the dozens each week, Leary said.

"Some people don't want to spend a couple thousand on a dress," Leary said. "You can rent a really nice dress and you don't have to keep it. But it has to be cleaned."

Vegas Vic

For the past 27 years Vic Plassman, owner of Steiner Cleaners, has been cleaning outfits worn by celebrities performing the Strip -- rock stars, showgirls and even actors who are in town filming on the streets and in the casinos.

"When I used to come here on vacation I'd look at all those names on the board and think wouldn't it be great to meet those people," he said.

The 63-year-old has met them via the dry-cleaning industry. He's mingled with Robert Goulet and handled the outlandish costumes of Liberace. He's cleaned the jeans and T-shirts of 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, the skimpy outfits worn by Christina Aguilera and Prince's velvet suits.

Plassman has nearly 100 photos of celebrities, including some he has posed with, hanging on the wall at Steiner Cleaners on East Tropicana Avenue.

"I did all the Rockettes' long dresses, sequins and skirts," Plassman said. "The fancy stuff they would wear in the show."

His handiwork can be seen in the movies "Casino," "Vegas Vacation" and "Pay It Forward," to name a few.

"You have to be careful when doing stuff for a movie," he said. "You can ruin a whole scene. It's just little things. T-shirts need to look faded."

The prison garb for "Undisputed" needed to be washed and hung, not pressed, he said. Plassman said he cleans nearly $500,000 in pieces annually at both of his store locations.

"The majority of my business is hotel work," Plassman said. "I do costumes, uniforms, valet services for guests.

"I do a lot of socks and underwear," he said, referring to when the Comdex computer convention comes to town. "You have to count each piece, get it on a ticket and make sure it gets in boxes and on hangers.

"It's been exciting. My wife wants me to retire. I just feel like I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing."

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