If you read the IRS website, you will find an expansion of the definition of “ordinary and necessary.“. Expenses do not have to be essential or indispensable, but they need to be ordinary, typical, or customary for the type of business you’re doing. That gives you a fair amount of leeway, and it also depends on what your business actually consists of.
I think you could certainly justify cleaning used clothes before selling them. I think you could probably even justify cleaning new clothes before you resold them, depending on what your business actually proposes to do. For example, many people wash new clothes before wearing them because they don’t know where they’ve come from and how they’ve been treated, particularly since so many of our clothes are made in foreign countries. (I seem to recall an episode of TV, maybe forensic files, in which blue jeans purchased in Mexico were contaminated with a deadly pesticide.) If you are using some special organic approved, low environmental impact, green friendly creating process and you advertise that your clothes are safer or greener because of your process, and you can get people to pay a premium for that, then why not consider that an expense of that particular business.
It ultimately comes down to whether the expenses you claim would be considered customary, reasonable, ordinary, necessary, etc. for the specific business activity you are performing.
