Everything in life is a trade-off between money and time; when it comes to collecting vintage fashion, I put in the time. Catalogs from brands like Dries van Noten, Narciso Rodriguez and Prada, heavy as bibles, guide my search for cheap grails. I’ve often had the feeling that I’m rescuing these items from living with someone who wouldn’t appreciate them. Do they even care that Rodriguez finished his seams so elegantly that you can wear his dresses inside out? This level of care makes me feel calm in a careless world. During the pandemic, the brightly clashing florals of Van Noten’s 2008 Spring-Summer collection captured my heart — and bit by bit, via eBay and Etsy, my closet became a lush and jumbled garden. I’m not much of a nature person, but these were the sorts of pandemic plants I could tend to.
Fashion collectors have an enemy greater than competitors, credit-card limits and small closets: the common clothes moth. The dreaded Tineola bisselliella is golden-brown, about the size of your fingernail and hates the sun. Adult moths don’t actually eat fabric. Rather, they lay eggs in cozy seams, and the larvae hatch and eat their way out. The more tender and luxurious the fabric, the nicer the nest. One evening, a fiend fluttered across my vision, and I tracked it until it landed in my garden of printed daisies. I panicked. Eventually I found small larval meals taken out of a thin black knit dress, a white T-shirt and my roommate’s cashmere sweater. I scrubbed my drawers and wept. I hate bugs and feel threatened by nature’s disorder. I was influenced by my father, a New York City native who, whenever we moved to a new house, suggested paving our lawn and turning it into a basketball court. My mother and two younger sisters were always trying to garden instead, but I ignored their efforts.
After finding the holes, I doubled down on keeping nature where I thought it belonged — outside my apartment. When I turned to Reddit and Wirecutter for help, I found that I wasn’t alone. Other people were warring against the invisible enemy, too, resorting to toxic mothballs that seem as likely to exterminate humans as insects. Some people even gave up and left their homes! I researched “screen repair,” put hormone traps in the backs of closets, sweaters in plastic tubs. One night I read an article about British ancestral homes whose priceless tapestries were being munched to bits. Their guardians had turned to tiny parasitic wasps called Trichogramma, which lay their eggs inside moth eggs, destroying the larvae. Wasps were arguably grosser than moths, but at least they didn’t eat my clothes. Were more bugs the answer?
I found a family business specializing in “beneficial insects” for the pesticide-averse home gardener. Their online shop sold me a card covered in minuscule wasp eggs. They arrived at my doorstep in a small cardboard box — all I had to do was cut open a plastic envelope and stick the cards, which looked like pieces of sandpaper, in my drawers. When I wrote to the company to confirm that I should be releasing microscopic parasites into my modest New York City apartment, they assured me that I had nothing to worry about.
The first step in my new project was getting over the ick factor. You know the packet of eggs is good if you see some tiny dots moving around. Then you have to learn what conditions they like (moderate temperatures, proximity to target) in order to put them where they’ll thrive. Trichogramma wasps search out the moth eggs themselves. If you can make peace with your new roommates, they’ll shoulder the work of a human exterminator and a housecleaning crew. It was a relief to imagine the Trichogramma wasps invisibly doing this work, happily parasitizing their hosts. I began receiving the packets every two weeks.
The ecosystem in my apartment has become an example of what Werner Herzog called “nature’s harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” That suits me fine: I’ve learned that I might feel better if I stop obsessing over keeping nature out and instead become more thoughtful about what I allow in. Suddenly I’m like my sisters, who live on five rural acres in North Carolina. Instead of killing roaches with poison, like New Yorkers do, they let their cats get the job done. In their own sprawling garden, they’ve taken into account the predator-prey relationships around them as a matter of course. They find my wasps hilarious, but not unique. My sister explained that my wasps are “a weird city version” of a common practice among gardeners: releasing ladybugs to get rid of aphids that plague tomatoes.
A year into my experiment, my collection is unchewed. Tiny wasps fly unseen among printed flowers, happily laying hundreds of useful eggs. I’m taking a cue from the designer Dries van Noten, who confessed that his famous garden outside of Antwerp, Belgium, humbles him. In fashion, he says, “you try to control everything. But in the garden, you have to obey nature.” If we work under fluorescent office lights and confine hikes to a treadmill, it’s easier to pretend that our lives can be nature-proofed. But our time in the city is shaped by rising temperatures that drive hurricanes to our shores and fry us in our little apartments built under black-tar roofs. Climate change causes insects to multiply and push north through balmy winters. I had tried to pave my way out of nature but find myself importing bugs on a biweekly subscription plan. It’s foolish to think our homes can truly rise above the dirt. Obviously the only thing that can be pristine is my Dries.
The post Moths Were Destroying My Clothes. Tiny Parasitic Wasps Saved Them. appeared first on New York Times.
