Shoe trees : are they really needed?

[Quirk]

That would be interesting too. When you consider the amount of consideration and money it costs to put together a nice wardrobe, it seems like there would maybe be more definitive, detailed answers to basic care questions. I'm sure that so many people, myself included, ruin a lot of clothes to figure out the answers for themselves. A lot of that anecdotal evidence get shared on wonderful forums like this. But it seems like maybe someone somewhere wants to do a study to publish somewhere and some of these questions could be taken up systematically in a well-designed experiment.

I mean, I accept that many people on these forums are true aficionados and want to treat their clothing in a very particular way simply because they love them - the way you might want to keep your high performance car in an elegant garage - not that it makes it perform any differently. But others, while we appreciate the look and feel of fine clothes, lean a bit more towards the practical side of things, and where there are tradeoffs to be made - be it money, or space, or effort, or what have you - we appreciate having a bit clearer sense of the functional utility of certain practices to decide if it's worthwhile for us.