• Jeeves New York

  39 E. 65th St., nr. Madison Ave.; 212-570-9130; jeevesny.com

  What Jeeves does differently from your everyday cleaner constitutes a long list. Consider: If there are delicate buttons on your blazer, they will be removed before cleaning and stitched back afterward. If your dress is made of mixed material—say, leather and silk—the techs will hand-clean the entire thing, dabbing on solvents and avoiding delicate areas. If they’re not sure how something’s supposed to look, they’ll e-mail you a digital photo and ask. Technicians will even come to your house to work on, say, a fabric-covered wall. Master cleaner Gerald von Pozniak is always on hand to take questions—that is, when he isn’t on the phone with the Metropolitan Opera, discussing how to get makeup smudges out of their costumes. You pay for all this, of course: Hand-cleaning a suit costs $145, about six times the typical rate. If it keeps bespoke tailoring from looking prematurely aged after a year or two, it suddenly seems worth it.

From the 2011 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine