Moths Have Been Partying in Your Dark Closet. What Now?

“I’m not gentle with them anymore,” said Laura Love. “I see one and I’m like, ‘I’m coming for you.’”

Ms. Love, 29, a model in Los Angeles, has waged war against the webbing clothes moths that she recently discovered during a quarantine closet clean, finding the pests running rampant in her knitwear.

“I wore sweatpants and leggings for a year, and my clothes didn’t get touched,” she said. She had to throw away everything from wool ski leggings to a 50-year-old Lucien Pellat Finet cashmere cardigan. “These are some bougie moths, they loved that one.”

Ms. Love, who moved from the East Coast during the pandemic, has since wallpapered her closet with cedar sheets held up by painters tape, keeping a prized rainbow-striped Elder Statesman sweater in a special moth booby trap with a cedar ball in each sleeve and moth monitoring pheromone traps above and below it.

“The whole thing is a psycho moth trap now,” she said. “I never had a problem in New York, but in New York, pre-Covid, I was actually wearing my clothes.”

When the newly vaccinated opened their closets in late spring after a year spent in bottom-drawer athleisure, many discovered that while they had left their suits and fine knits undisturbed, the moths had not.