Pressing is one of the most important stages of the dry cleaning process, as it plays a pivotal role in finishing the look of a garment. A bad pressing job can make a quality garment look terrible, and a good pressing job can often make a mediocre garment look and fit great. When pressed properly, a garment will have no wrinkles, and will drape on your body the way the designer intended.
However, pressing is one of the most time consuming parts of the dry cleaning process, and therefore the most costly in terms of labor. Low quality (low price) cleaners survive by processing as many garments per hour as possible, to keep labor costs per garment low. So, they must cut corners. (They also cut corners in their cleaning process, as mentioned earlier).
The lowest quality dry cleaners simply send garments through a steam tunnel to relax some of the wrinkles out. This results in a garment that is still wrinkled and droopy, without proper body.
Others will try to press some parts of the garment but save time by doing things such as pressing both legs of a pair of pants at the same time, one on top of the other. The result is seam impressions, double creases, and wrinkles actually created from the pressing process.
At a quality dry cleaner, garments are first put on a form finisher to relax out some of the wrinkles and give the garment proper body and contours. Afterwards, the entire garment is pressed by hand, section by section.
