Jonathan Wilkins

This brings to mind something: (I probably should have waited to respond last night until I'd rested, so I'd feel more like going into detail)

I first ought to insert that one of the complexities of talking about washing rubber clothing is that "latex" is a specific variety of natural rubber and that most clothing that's commonly called latex is not even latex: it's extruded sheet rubber in one of the synthetic varieties.

In the fetish fashion industry, latex has come to generally mean "thin rubber" and most often to rubber objects formed by dipping a form into a liquified form of the rubber - in my opinion, true natural latex isn't suitable for anything durable. In my experience, natural latex can actually be damaged just by tap water alone if left wet.

Most manufacturers are somewhat bad about disclosing the type of rubber used. If I buy a regular shirt in a store, it'll tell me x% polyester, x% cotton, etc. I'm not sure I've ever seen rubber clothing with a similar label indicating the variety of rubber it is. (unless it was rubber clothing created for laboratory wear)

The vast majority of the clothing I made back in the day was adhesive-seamed or riveted together from sheet neoprene and in anything from 1/64" to 1/8" thick: neoprene's one of the better rubbers for resistance to chemicals, sunlight, water, etc. After a fashion show where somehow silver spray paint got all over a few items, I actually cleaned the thicker stuff with paint thinner but there are a variety of reasons that was safe in that instance that might not apply even to all neoprene. Even among a single variety of rubber, like neoprene, silicone, nitrile, EPDM, etc, rubber is further divided into groups by "durometer" or hardness. Different durometers of neoprene, then, are created from different formulations and are thus more or less susceptible to certain types of damage.

If you have any idea what type of rubber it is, this page may give you an idea of how delicately you'll need to treat it during cleaning. I always hope that manufacturers have largely switched to rubber that they've evaluated for all the likely risk factors - for instance, I think it's absurd to manufacture rubber clothing that can't be exposed to petroleum products, but I've seen clothing that could be destroyed by vaseline. Sadly, I'm sure there are still plenty that ask their fabricator "can I get these made in bright red?" and have no idea that the first thing that comes to this fabricator's mind is red epdm rubber that'll rot if someone shines it up with a can of WD40.