What Is Distressed Denim?

How is distressed denim made?

Distressed denim is made by wearing away the colour and surface of finished denim garments, and sometimes cutting or tearing them, so they look worn. A Levi Strauss & Co. patent on laser finishing, granted in 2018, sorts the traditional methods into dry abrasion, such as sandblasting or sandpaper, and wet processing, which includes washing with pumice stone and with oxidisers such as bleach, ozone and potassium permanganate. The same patent names the wear patterns finishers copy: honeycombs, whiskers, stacks and train tracks.

Whiskers, which the Levi Strauss patent shows on the thigh regions of worn jeans, are one of those wear patterns, and adding them is known as whiskering.

When did distressed denim become fashionable?

The ripped look grew out of the worn-out jeans of a mid-1970s anti-establishment style, and in the 1980s manufacturers made the wear in advance on a large scale. The sources used here name no single inventor of deliberately distressed jeans.

Punk made the look visible. According to the National Library of Scotland, it was displayed at the CBGB club in New York and carried to the King’s Road shops of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in London. In early-1980s Britain, the journalist Robert Elms named the fashion for distressed, baggy jeans “Hard Times”.

Factories made that wear in advance. Instead of waiting years for denim to fade, they abraded it by washing it with pumice stones, and Lee began large-scale stonewashing in 1982. Industrialised treatments made stonewashing and acid washing easy and cheap to get. By 1988, the library notes, the rips in jeans were larger than ever, and jeans were not fashionable unless slit in multiple places. Snow-washed denim lasted into the mid-1990s, as part of the grunge subculture.

What does distressing do to the fabric?

Distressing removes the blue surface of the yarn to reveal pale cotton underneath, and ripping removes threads from the cloth altogether. Denim is a twill with coloured, usually blue, warp threads and white filling threads, so the white strands you see across a hole or frayed patch are the filling.

The blue warp is pale inside too. Indigo is applied to the surface of the cotton yarn and diffuses inwards, so it sits as a ring around the edge of each yarn. Abrasion, such as sanding or sandblasting, removes part of that dyed outer ring, and a laser burns it away; either way the white inner core shows through. That is why abraded areas turn whitish rather than simply a lighter blue. Unlike raw denim, which is sold unwashed, distressed denim has had this done before it reaches the shop.

How do you read the label on distressed denim?

Read the care label rather than the fibre-content label, because distressing is a finish, not a fibre. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission’s Care Labeling Rule requires complete instructions for regular care, or a warning that the garment cannot be cleaned without harm. The label must also warn about procedures that would damage the garment even though shoppers might assume they are safe.

• “No bleach” or “Do not bleach”: every commercial bleach would harm the item with regular use.
• “Only non-chlorine bleach, when needed”: chlorine bleach would harm it; other bleaches would not.
• Symbols: optional in the US, as long as the words are there. Any symbols must follow the ASTM system, not the ISO symbols used in Europe.

Fibre content falls under separate FTC labelling rules, so look there, not on the care label, for the fibres in a blend.

How do you tell good distressed denim from poor?

Judge it by how the wear pattern was applied, by what the holes are made of, and by what the label and the maker tell you, because the finish alone will not tell you whether a pair was sandblasted.

• Compare two of the same style. A laser prints a wear pattern specified in a design file, so pairs finished from the same file can carry the same pattern. The Clean Clothes Campaign says laser fading looks more artificial than sandblasting.
• Look into a hole. White strands across it are filling threads, so part of the weave is still in place; a hole with no strands has lost both sets of threads.
• Check the care label. Under US law it must be attached permanently and stay legible for the garment’s useful life. A missing or unreadable label on new jeans sold in the US is a red flag.
• Ask about sandblasting. Hand sanding can give results similar to manual sandblasting, so the finish alone may not show how a pair was made. Ask the maker which methods it uses and whether it has banned sandblasting.

Is distressed denim sustainable?

Distressing adds water, chemical and worker-health costs to a pair of jeans, and how large they are depends on the method; no source here measures the full footprint. The Levi Strauss & Co. laser patent says traditional finishing may take about 20 to 60 litres of water per pair, and claims laser finishing cuts harsh chemicals and waste. That claim comes from the patent holder.

The worker-health cost is best documented for sandblasting. A 2008 study in the European Respiratory Journal examined 157 former denim sandblasters in Erzurum, Turkey, with an average age of 23. Of the 145 with readable chest X-rays, 77 (53%) showed silicosis. In March 2009 Turkey banned sand and silica in the blasting of denim and other textiles. A Clean Clothes Campaign report of March 2012 found manual sandblasting still taking place in Bangladesh, often at night to avoid detection. The same report said potassium permanganate spray exposes workers to harmful inhalation, and that laser fading is safer but too costly for most suppliers.