Recently I scanned the statement of authenticity on a brand-new pair of good old bluejeans. Printed on the inside of the left pocket, beneath an equine insignia, an 1873 patent date and a boast of its status as “an American tradition, symbolizing the vitality of the West,” Levi Strauss & Company reissued its ancient invitation to inspect the dry goods: “We shall thank you to carefully examine the sewing, finish and fit.” The fit was slim, the sewing sound, the finish glamorously traumatized, as if intending homage to clothes Steve McQueen might have worn home from a bike crash.
A ragged extravagance of fraying squiggled from each knee, where an irregular network of holes was patched from behind by a white-cotton rectangle stretchier than sterile gauze. Knotted to a belt loop was a paper tag headed “Destruction,” explaining that these Levi’s, shredded to resemble “the piece you just can’t part with,” merited gentle treatment: “Be sure to take extra care when wearing and washing.” The process of proving the denim tough had endowed it with the value of lace.
These jeans sent a dual message — of armor, of swaddling — in the accepted doublespeak of distressed denim. Pre-washed bluejeans are now sold already on their last legs: ripped, blasted, trashed, wrecked, abused, destroyed, sabotaged, devastated and, in what may be a borrowing of aerospace jargon for drones obliterated by remote control, destructed. Below this disaster-headline language, the fine print babbles smoothly about the soft comfort of deep familiarity, as the textile historian Beverly Gordon observed in a paper titled “American Denim.” These are clothes that suit the Friday-evening needs of Forever 21-year-olds buttressing their unformed selves with ceremonial battle scars, and they also meet the Saturday-morning wants of grown-ups who, arrayed as if to hint at having been out all night, enliven the running of errands by wearing trousers that look and feel like an opiated hangover.
The mass clique of distressed denim exists in polar opposition to another school of bluejean enthusiasm: the dye-stained cult of raw denim. The denim purists — looking professional in unsullied indigo fresh off the shuttle loom, in their natural habitat of bare brick walls and old gnarled wood and other textures invested with magical thinking — are likely to meet the approval of strict good taste. As opposed to people who buy their jeans prefaded and abraded, with a thumb-wide key punch in the watch pocket and the sham phantom of a wallet’s edge in back. But sometimes good taste goes on holiday, to a music festival, for example, turned out in acid-streaked, bleach-stained, chaotically nasty cutoffs. This is the order of things. One point of beat-up bluejeans is to bother good taste, which is a muscular aesthetic stance, a canny market footing and an ambiguous moral position.
Some distressed denim is beauty-marked with subtle scuffs amounting to off-duty signs. Some is lavishly slashed into canvases for abstract craft work, with a fleeciness of bare threads asymmetrically outlined by stubby blue tufts, a kind of plumage for people treating a humble fiber as a vehicle for expressing splendor. There are bluejeans serially slit up the front, space striped as if by the shadows of window blinds in a film noir, and sometimes they are sold by shop assistants wearing jeans sliced to bare hamstrings, as if everyone’s bored of the old ways of constraining the sight and shape of the body. There is a place in Paris that gathers old bluejeans as raw material for reassembled jeans that will cost $1,450 a pair. Which would be a bargain if you believed the piece worthy of framing as a collage deconstructing aperture and entropy and the tensions of a labor-class fabric reworked as universal playwear. (...)
“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord wrote in “Society of the Spectacle.” He was describing a phenomenom now exemplified by new denim marketed as having been “aged to mimic look and feel of 11-year-old denim.” The product lets its buyers slip into the approximation of a lived-in skin and by proximity, to enhance their own personal histories.
The insolence of indecent denim has evolved into a prefab mannerism, a marker of “punk chic” or “grunge cool.” The holes can still reify a generation gap, I think, having heard a 35-year-old banker say that she cannot put on such jeans without imagining her parents’ disapproval: “You should have worn those dungarees all day long until you wore them out yourself.” But that purist’s objection misses the point. The patent insincerity of distressed denim is integral to its appeal. What to make, glancing around the waiting room, of the precision-shredded knees of a pair of plainly expensive maternity jeans promoted for their “rock ’n’ roll appeal”? No one supposes that a woman wearing an elasticized waistband to accommodate the fullness of her third trimester wiped out on her skateboard. The lie is not a lie but a statement of participation in a widespread fantasy. Contentedly pretending to be a dangerous bohemian, she is simply exercising the right to be her own Joey Ramone. We put on jeans with ruined threading in a self-adoring performance of annihilation.
A ragged extravagance of fraying squiggled from each knee, where an irregular network of holes was patched from behind by a white-cotton rectangle stretchier than sterile gauze. Knotted to a belt loop was a paper tag headed “Destruction,” explaining that these Levi’s, shredded to resemble “the piece you just can’t part with,” merited gentle treatment: “Be sure to take extra care when wearing and washing.” The process of proving the denim tough had endowed it with the value of lace.These jeans sent a dual message — of armor, of swaddling — in the accepted doublespeak of distressed denim. Pre-washed bluejeans are now sold already on their last legs: ripped, blasted, trashed, wrecked, abused, destroyed, sabotaged, devastated and, in what may be a borrowing of aerospace jargon for drones obliterated by remote control, destructed. Below this disaster-headline language, the fine print babbles smoothly about the soft comfort of deep familiarity, as the textile historian Beverly Gordon observed in a paper titled “American Denim.” These are clothes that suit the Friday-evening needs of Forever 21-year-olds buttressing their unformed selves with ceremonial battle scars, and they also meet the Saturday-morning wants of grown-ups who, arrayed as if to hint at having been out all night, enliven the running of errands by wearing trousers that look and feel like an opiated hangover.
The mass clique of distressed denim exists in polar opposition to another school of bluejean enthusiasm: the dye-stained cult of raw denim. The denim purists — looking professional in unsullied indigo fresh off the shuttle loom, in their natural habitat of bare brick walls and old gnarled wood and other textures invested with magical thinking — are likely to meet the approval of strict good taste. As opposed to people who buy their jeans prefaded and abraded, with a thumb-wide key punch in the watch pocket and the sham phantom of a wallet’s edge in back. But sometimes good taste goes on holiday, to a music festival, for example, turned out in acid-streaked, bleach-stained, chaotically nasty cutoffs. This is the order of things. One point of beat-up bluejeans is to bother good taste, which is a muscular aesthetic stance, a canny market footing and an ambiguous moral position.
Some distressed denim is beauty-marked with subtle scuffs amounting to off-duty signs. Some is lavishly slashed into canvases for abstract craft work, with a fleeciness of bare threads asymmetrically outlined by stubby blue tufts, a kind of plumage for people treating a humble fiber as a vehicle for expressing splendor. There are bluejeans serially slit up the front, space striped as if by the shadows of window blinds in a film noir, and sometimes they are sold by shop assistants wearing jeans sliced to bare hamstrings, as if everyone’s bored of the old ways of constraining the sight and shape of the body. There is a place in Paris that gathers old bluejeans as raw material for reassembled jeans that will cost $1,450 a pair. Which would be a bargain if you believed the piece worthy of framing as a collage deconstructing aperture and entropy and the tensions of a labor-class fabric reworked as universal playwear. (...)
“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord wrote in “Society of the Spectacle.” He was describing a phenomenom now exemplified by new denim marketed as having been “aged to mimic look and feel of 11-year-old denim.” The product lets its buyers slip into the approximation of a lived-in skin and by proximity, to enhance their own personal histories.
The insolence of indecent denim has evolved into a prefab mannerism, a marker of “punk chic” or “grunge cool.” The holes can still reify a generation gap, I think, having heard a 35-year-old banker say that she cannot put on such jeans without imagining her parents’ disapproval: “You should have worn those dungarees all day long until you wore them out yourself.” But that purist’s objection misses the point. The patent insincerity of distressed denim is integral to its appeal. What to make, glancing around the waiting room, of the precision-shredded knees of a pair of plainly expensive maternity jeans promoted for their “rock ’n’ roll appeal”? No one supposes that a woman wearing an elasticized waistband to accommodate the fullness of her third trimester wiped out on her skateboard. The lie is not a lie but a statement of participation in a widespread fantasy. Contentedly pretending to be a dangerous bohemian, she is simply exercising the right to be her own Joey Ramone. We put on jeans with ruined threading in a self-adoring performance of annihilation.
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mauricio Alejo
