The first warm fortnight of summer is when the clothes moth makes its move. You won't see the damage in June — you'll see it in October, when you pull out a favourite jumper and find two neat holes near the cuff and a third you can poke a finger through. By then the culprits are long gone. The eggs were laid weeks ago, in the warmth, in the dark, in the exact corner of the wardrobe you never disturb.
Late June is the sensible time to deal with this, and not for some vague seasonal-tidiness reason. The common clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella) and the case-bearing moth both breed faster as the house warms up, and most British homes hit their cosiest indoor temperatures from now through August. That's the breeding window. Interrupt it now and you stop the autumn damage before it starts — which is a far cheaper job than re-knitting the elbow of a £180 lambswool cardigan.
Why summer, and why now specifically
Here's what actually does the damage: not the moth you see fluttering up the stairwell, but the larvae. Adult clothes moths don't even have functioning mouthparts — they don't eat. The grubs do, and they eat keratin, which means wool, cashmere, silk, feathers, and the felt pads inside piano lids. Cotton and synthetics they'll leave alone unless those fabrics are stained with sweat, food, or anything organic, in which case all bets are off.
The warmth speeds up their whole life cycle. In an unheated Victorian box room a generation might take most of a year; in a centrally warmed flat in July it can run in a couple of months, so you get overlapping waves rather than one tidy hatch. That's why people who treat moths once in spring and assume they're done are often the ones cursing in autumn. You're not fighting a single event — you're fighting a population, and the population is most active right now.
Find the nests before you spend a penny
Before buying anything, do the boring half-hour that actually works: a proper search. Pull everything out of the wardrobe and the bottom drawers. Larvae and their little silk cases hide where it's dark and undisturbed — the underside of folded knits, the seam of a coat that's been hanging since March, the carpet under the bed where it meets the skirting. Look for grains that resemble sand or fine grit. That's frass — larvae droppings — and it's the clearest sign you've got an active problem rather than one stray adult that wandered in through a window.
Wool rugs are the other blind spot. Lift them. The pile against the floor, especially under a sofa nobody moves, is prime moth real estate, and a £400 wool rug can be quietly hollowed out from underneath while the top looks pristine.
The wash-and-freeze routine
Heat and cold both kill every stage — egg, larva, adult. Anything washable goes in at 60°C if the care label allows, which most cottons and many wool-blends do not, so check first. For the delicate things that can't take a hot wash — cashmere, silk, that suit — the freezer does the job. Bag the item, squeeze the air out, and leave it in a domestic freezer for at least 72 hours. A week is better, because home freezers don't hold a steady deep cold and the eggs are stubborn.
- Hot wash (60°C) for sturdy washables — cheapest and most thorough.
- Freeze for 72 hours minimum for anything that can't take heat.
- Dry-clean for tailored wool — solvent kills larvae, and the press finishes the job.
- A hot tumble-dry cycle works too, if the fabric tolerates it, though it won't reach into folded layers as reliably as a soak.
What to actually buy — and what's a waste of money
Cedar gets recommended constantly, and it's only half-useful. Cedarwood blocks repel adult moths through their oils, but the oils fade within months and they do nothing to larvae already in residence. If you go cedar, you have to sand the blocks lightly two or three times a year to reopen the surface, or they're just nice-smelling wood. A pack of Acana cedar blocks runs about £6–£9 at Robert Dyas or on the high street.
Lavender is similar — pleasant, mildly repellent, not a treatment. The thing that genuinely shifts an infestation is a pheromone trap paired with a proper clear-out. The traps use the female moth's scent to glue down the males, which breaks the breeding cycle, and they double as a monitor: if the sticky card fills up, you know you've still got a live population and where it's concentrated. Acana and Total Wardrobe Care both sell them; expect £8–£15 for a pack of two or three. Lakeland stocks the Total Wardrobe Care range if you'd rather see them in person.
My honest recommendation: skip the scattergun approach of one cedar ball per drawer and nothing else. Buy two pheromone traps, do the full wash-and-freeze, and seal the cleaned woollens into airtight boxes or vacuum bags. The traps tell you whether it worked. The blocks just make you feel like you've done something.
Storing the winter wardrobe so it survives till November
This is the part most people get backwards. They pack winter knits away dirty — "I'll wash them in autumn" — and that's exactly the invitation a moth wants, because larvae go for the sweat and skin oils far more readily than clean fibre. Everything you store must be clean first. Then seal it properly: lidded plastic boxes with the rim wiped down, or vacuum bags, not the cardboard suit boxes from the loft that moths chew through without noticing.
If you've got genuinely valuable pieces — a vintage coat, a handmade quilt — Total Wardrobe Care does cotton garment bags with a herbal lining for around £20–£30 each, which sounds steep until you weigh it against the item. For everything else, a stack of Really Useful Boxes from Ryman or Wickes at £6–£10 a box does the same job. Air the stored items once mid-summer and check the traps. A wardrobe that's been emptied, cleaned, and sealed in late June will come through to November untouched — provided you didn't seal a problem in with it, which is why the search comes first and the boxes come last.
The bit nobody mentions until it's too late
Moths don't respect wardrobe doors. They'll move from a forgotten woollen scarf in the hall cupboard to the bedroom, to the wool runner on the landing, to the felt inside your hi-fi speakers. So treating one room and ignoring the rest is how an infestation comes straight back — clear one wardrobe perfectly and they simply re-seed it from the rug two metres away. Do the whole soft-furnishing audit in one pass, the same weekend, or don't bother.
One exception worth naming: if you find live larvae in three or more separate rooms, with frass and visible damage, that's past the DIY stage. A professional moth treatment from a firm like Rentokil starts around £150–£250 for a typical flat, and it's money well spent when the alternative is losing a wardrobe's worth of wool over the course of a single summer. Two traps and a hot wash handle the early problem. They don't rescue a colony that's already spread through the carpets.