‘Jeans were born to be used by workers,’ said a local activist, Martin Barrios, ‘now they can cost thousands of dollars and are produced on the backs of exploitation and environmental destruction.’ … Nearby factories were the problem – dozens of them, which are dedicated to doing to jeans in hours what used to take years of wear . . . The clean garments are left ready for sale, while in many factories the chemicals used to treat them are left to flow away in bright indigo waste.
Why is any of this happening? At least until recently, when some other genres of clothes seem to be getting in on the act, there were no other items of clothing that we would find in our retail stores which appear to have been speckled with bleach, torn at the knee, stained with rust, worn out with rubbing, ripped and frayed at several places and subject to a whole series of other destructive processes. If we saw signs of such abuse on any other clothing we possess, let alone intended to buy, we would ourselves become pretty distressed. The nature of the twill helps create the effect but does not of itself explain why jeans, which for a hundred years were sold without distressing, developed this unique other market.
One clue is that distressing goes alongside other forms of transformation. Blue jeans were a garment that at the same time that distressing processes were being developed also become subject to other forms of embroidered embellishments, ranging from sequins to flowers. These effects, too, have been commodified on analogy with distressing. If one goes to the main Levi’s shop in San Francisco, one can order machine-made embroidery, adding sequins and other similar effects simply by conveying the style and form required. But standing in a Levi’s shop in San Francisco, in particular, looking at embroidered flowers is an ideal circumstance to evoke a particular moment in the past, the time of the hippie.
The story can be told personally, in that I was of the generation whose behaviour is being copied by commercial distressing of pre-sold jeans. As a teenager I hitchhiked around rock concerts, wearing flares and flowered shirts (purple and adorned with beads, if you must know). I had blue denim jeans that were worn so much, in such rough conditions, and with so little attention to washing and care that after a while they became naturally abraded and frayed in just the manner that is simulated by commerce today. It was not that there was any fashion in the earliest stages for such extreme abuse of one’s own clothes. The holes, the beer stains, the rips, the fraying, were the natural outcome of a specific life-style, combining lack of money to buy new clothes, independence from home and parental care, a sense of freedom, travel and general hippie personal irresponsibility where one just didn’t care about such things. Stone washing of jeans followed rather naturally from the stoned state of the people who had been wearing them.
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