My wife gets these dresses from a hippie store that look beautiful but are so bad about bleeding dye in the wash. I'd never had it happen before then, but I also used to wash on cool before we had kids.

Wash on cold. It mostly solves this issue.

Just don’t buy red clothes

You can use vinegar to set dyes.

Red dye is particularly hard to set unless the Dyer knows and cares to do it

The dumb shit you learn when you date someone who does historically accurate recreation events....

Most of your white clothes are more like grey off white now if you'd care about that. I dont.

I wash on cold (or warm) and stopped separating laundry by colour a while ago and now separate it by purpose. Like a load of my clothes, a load of my daughter's clothes (that she loads and unloads herself, not raising someone that gets confused when she needs to clean her clothes when she moves out), towels get their own load (with added bleach, colourful ones just fade over time), same with bedsheets (no bleach here though).

If I remember, I'll do new colourful clothes separately on their first wash with the assumption that most of the dye that is going to come out will come out during the first wash.

Was that red dress washed before? I always wash new clothes before the first wear, then just separate lights and darks in general. (Disclaimer: I own literally zero white clothes, so even the light ones are already pastel colours.)

If you wash whites with black & colored items they become grey. perhaps generally unnoticeable but it's one of those details that makes people look really well put together.

Dude I had also been doing that for years and I just had a hoodie bleed onto all my clothes. Idk wtf

It really is just very red things and white things you can't mix.

They make these sheets you throw in with your mixed color loads, I think called Color Catchers or something?

I always sort mine by white, black, everything else. The whites can be bleached a bit to give 'em pop. The blacks don't get fuzzies from the colors. After washing I pull the stuff that shouldn't be dried, like hats, bras and shoes, and pull the stuff that's spun down to barely damp, hang that stuff.

same! i washed some red pants that i bought at an international clothes market and now i have a bunch of pink clothes!! i consider it an upgrade

I used to do that too until I had to use shirts to work. White shirts lose that sheen and bright white so quickly if you mix them.

Happened to me once, too.