With her new fabric care brand Unwworn, fashion magazine editor turned strategist Meg McKenna wants to make it chic to do your laundry less often. Her first launch is L’eaundry, a high-end scent to spritz on knits and delicates between dry cleans or spin cycles.
“We’ve reimagined wellness, but clothing care never got that same upgrade. People don’t give their wardrobe the same attention they give their skin and hair. It was an idea that I couldn’t stop thinking about,” McKenna says of how the brand was conceived.
The south Londoner found that in spite of conscious consumerism and “slow fashion” becoming more mainstream, we still overwash our clothes – wearing them out in the process and leading to monumental impacts on the environment. “We’ve been taught that clean equals care, but overwashing destroys £440 million worth of clothing in the UK every year. Most pieces don’t need a full wash after a day – even if you spill something. Spot-cleaning goes a long way. A quick refresh goes a long way,” she says.
To lure in the fashion crowd McKenna knew she had to produce something with both style and substance. “The most sustainable clothes are the ones you already own and actively care for. So the priority was creating a product beautiful enough that it genuinely changes behaviour,” she says. It was developed with a PhD laundry chemist and a UK-based perfumer.
L’eaundry’s black round-stoppered glass case will look at home in any scent-lover’s fragrance wardrobe. “It needed to feel like a small luxury, not a sustainability project,” adds McKenna, who has plans to introduce refills soon.
As for the olfactory side of things, put aside any thoughts of Febreze; L’eaundry is more like Le Labo but specifically formulated for fabrics, not skin. Importantly, the scent is water-based – alcohol dries out and damages natural fibres, especially wool – and it contains a high fragrance content of 4 per cent, versus the 1 per cent used in most similar products.
The fragrance notes were inspired by “laundry lines in the Mediterranean: the cotton moving in warm wind against pastel lime-washed walls, and that addictive smell of sun-dried fabric.” The result is a mix of musks that are long-lasting, with ozonic notes that neutralise odour.
McKenna hopes that by getting her customers to pay more attention to the condition of their clothes, she can help shift attitudes away from “wear once and wash” to one of “rewear, refresh, repair”. She insists it’s a “cultural win, not just a product win”, that will contribute to the circular economy.
As for what she’ll be spritzing with L’eaundry, McKenna says her favourite places to shop are “archive stores like Files London and Brother_LDN. I think the best sustainability work is often done by vintage dealers quietly preserving clothes and giving them new life.”
