A silk blouse often costs more to dry clean than a wool coat, despite being a fraction of the size. Price follows the handling a garment needs rather than the amount of fabric involved.
What the process actually does
Dry cleaning uses a liquid solvent instead of water. Fabrics that would shrink, distort or bleed in a washing machine survive it because the fibres never swell the way water makes them swell.
The solvent runs through filters and is distilled and reused, so the cost of running a load stays fairly flat. A drum full of coats and a drum full of shirts consume much the same resources.
Which means the variable cost of a single garment sits almost entirely in what a person has to do to it before and after the machine.
Labour is the line item that moves
A cotton shirt goes onto a mechanical press shaped roughly like a torso, and the whole finishing operation takes a minute or two with very little judgement involved.
A pleated skirt, a lined jacket or a beaded evening dress cannot go near that press. Each is finished by hand with a steam iron, and the pleats have to be set individually.
Hand finishing scales with time rather than volume, so the price rises with the number of awkward details rather than the weight of the garment.
Risk gets priced in as well
Some fabrics and trims are unpredictable. Dyes can migrate, adhesives holding sequins can soften, and leather trim on a wool coat can stiffen while the wool is perfectly fine.
A cleaner who damages a garment usually absorbs the replacement cost. Items with a high chance of going wrong therefore carry a premium that covers the occasional loss.
This is also why cleaners refuse work outright. If the expected cost of failure exceeds anything they can reasonably charge, declining is the rational answer.
Spotting is a separate skill
Stain removal happens before the garment goes in, at a bench with steam, vacuum and a set of chemistries chosen against the specific stain and the specific fibre.
Protein, tannin, oil and pigment stains all need different treatment, and the wrong choice can set a stain permanently rather than lift it.
Shops with a skilled spotter charge for that skill. Shops without one send difficult garments out to a plant, which adds a handling margin on top.
Why the ticket price is not the whole cost
Solvent cleaning is gentle on structure but it is not free of wear. Repeated cycles gradually strip natural oils from wool and soften the interfacings that give a jacket its shape.
Garments cleaned only when genuinely soiled, and aired or spot-treated the rest of the time, last considerably longer than garments cleaned on a schedule.
The economics of a wardrobe therefore include how often each piece has to be cleaned, which is a property of the garment as much as of the wearer.