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A lined drape is not one fabric. It is a face fabric, a lining, and often an interlining between them, each with its own shrinkage rate. Wash them together and they no longer match.
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Drapes
A cotton or linen face fabric may shrink several percent in a warm wash. A polyester lining shrinks almost none. Sewn together along their edges, the two now fight each other: the face pulls up, the lining hangs long, and the panel puckers along the seams and sits crooked at the hem. Even a perfectly even shrink is a problem, because a floor-length drape that loses two percent of its length no longer reaches the floor and cannot be let down.
The pleats at the top of a drape are set with tape, buckram or heading stiffener, and much of that structure is glue-based. Washing softens it. The pleats lose their shape, the header goes limp, and the panel no longer hangs in the folds it was made for. Restoring that means remaking the header, which costs more than the cleaning ever would have.
Blackout and thermal linings carry an applied coating on the reverse. Machine washing cracks it, and the cracking shows as light leaking through in patches once the drape is rehung. Once a blackout coating has begun to delaminate the panel cannot be repaired and the lining has to be replaced. This is one of the most common ways good drapery is ruined by a well-intentioned owner.
Cleaning on the rod means the panel keeps its length, its pleats and its hang throughout. Nothing is submerged, nothing is agitated, and the coating on a lining is never flexed. It also means the windows are never bare and nobody has to rehang heavy panels from a ladder, which on tall Huntington windows is the genuinely dangerous part of the job. Because the panels stay hanging, drapery is easy to schedule alongside other work in the same room.
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