Dry cleaner uses the chemical perchloroethylene to clean the item. The item to be dry cleaned is placed into a special machine that works sort of like a regular washing machine except that it uses the solvent that I mentioned instead of water. The machine also recollects all the solvent used and filters it to reuse it. An item that has stains that are water based do not really clean as well when dry cleaned. But yes dry cleaning really does clean the item that is dry cleaned.

The reason that some items must be dry cleaned is because some fabrics will absorb water and destroy the fibers where as the cleaning solvent does no