I’m working monochromatically here within the grayscale as you can see by my black cardigan sweater made more casual with its two front pockets and my gray and white stripe shirt. In today’s video, I’m wearing a casual outfit good for doing some garment care around the house. Do you have a preference between irons and steamers? Share with us in the comments! Outfit Rundown The well-prepared gentleman, then, should ideally have an iron and a steamer in his garment care arsenal. It’s ideal for touch-ups and for use while traveling. Meanwhile, a steamer is easier to use, more versatile overall, and provides generally good results on both delicate and average weight fabrics. While ironing takes a bit longer and requires a bit more expertise, it provides a level of polish a steamer can’t. It’s best to have both an iron and a steamer in your arsenal!Īn iron is better if results matter to you. Steamers, therefore, are generally going to be more user-friendly overall. This is in contrast to an iron, where if you’ve got multiple layers of fabric on top of one another, you might be wrinkling one portion while smoothing out another.
When using a steamer with a hanging garment you won’t create creases, as you aren’t flattening the fabric against a hard surface and you’ll easily be able to see how the garment naturally hangs. Whether hand-held or stand-up, steamers typically aren’t going to take up as much room as an ironing setup, either. Steamers are generally faster than irons, as well, as you don’t have to lay your garments out on a flat surface and keep re-positioning them as you work. The user simply needs to hang up their garment, fill the steamer’s water reservoir and plug it in, wait for a few minutes, and then go over the article with a sweeping motion, allowing the steam from the wand to straighten out any wrinkles. Steamers typically aren’t going to take up as much room as an ironing setupĪlso, most steamers are easy to use. Garment steamers made this job much easier. At the time many people used a tea kettle to steam out wrinkles in their hats or to re-block them.
#Standing steam iron portable#
Some sources indicate that more portable models came about because of the popularity of men’s hats in the first half of the 20th century.
#Standing steam iron professional#
Meanwhile, commercial fabric steamers (also called garment steamers or simply steamers) have been available since the early 1900s, employed early on by professional cleaners before spreading to home usage–but compact models are a fairly modern innovation. It was these irons that achieved popularity and led the way to the more widespread use of electric steam ironing during the 1940s and ’50s, which continues up to the present day. Four years later, in 1938, Skolnik granted the Steam-O-Matic Corporation of New York the exclusive right to manufacture steam-electric irons.
The patent for an electric steam iron was issued to Max Skolnik of Chicago in 1934. The first commercially available electric steam iron was introduced in 1926 by the Eldec company of New York, but it wasn’t initially a commercial success. Meanwhile, credit for the invention of the steam iron goes to Thomas Sears. Seeley of New York City in 1882, however. The invention of the resistively heated electric iron is credited to Henry W.