wash 'n' wear?

Growing up in the mean streets of the Marshall Middle School in Billerica, Mass., one of the things I learned right off the bat was that wearing the same shirt two days in a row was grounds for a pummeling. Or at least a lot of whispering, cackling, or name-calling. You learned quickly not to do it.

This belief served me well in adult life, too. If I wore a shirt to work, I wore it home and put it in the laundry bag. On the first wearing. A one-shot deal. Nobody at work was gonna pummel me in the Bose manufacturing staff meeting, that was for sure.

But then I came to Iceland, and that rule seems to have flown out the window. People think nothing of wearing the same shirt, the same sweater, the same pants. Two, three, sometimes even four days in a row, in some cases. When I first started work and kept seeing the same people in the same clothes, day in, day out, I was shocked. But also accepting; it did help with personal recognition in those early, confusing days. I started envisioning those clothes as their wearer's personal uniform.

But how do they do it? Because the clothes always look neat and well-pressed here, this remains a mystery. Do they take the clothes home and slave over the þvottapottur every night, completing a full wash/dry/press cycle every 24 hours? Do they maybe have 5 or 6 copies of the same shirt? Or a team of red-hatted clothes-care gnomes? Or, through centuries of repeat clothes-wearing, have Icelanders evolved special smell-suppressing and permanent-press genes that enable multiple neatly pressed wearings? Or do they just walk into the shower fully clothed every night, subscribing to the same two-birds-one-stone theory as a guy I knew in college?

This could definitely be one for the I-Files.