From Distressed to Raw

I'd like to think I've always had some innate value and eye for aesthetics, but I can't remember thinking about fashion for the first 18 years of my life. Just like most kids, I woke up every morning for school and put on whatever shirt and pair of shorts were laying on the floor of my room. I didn't think much about the words "fit," "match" or "cut." I just wore what was around.

One afternoon, when I was about 19, I walked into Nordstrom at the Florida Mall. My department store experiences up until this point consisted mostly of Dillards and Sears, and chances are that a store that sells lawn mowers, washing machines and apparel isn't the most fashion forward of clothiers. I balked upon walking up to a rack of jeans and noticing a price tag of over $150. So, I turned up my nose and walked out of the store in my bootleg GAP jeans and stripped polo.

Over the next few days, I didn't talk of my experience in Nordstrom, but I must admit that my curiosity had been piqued.

"I wonder if $150 jeans actually feel different," I would say to myself followed by a quick, "but there's no way anyone could justify that!" Within a week, I was standing on a pedestal in the men's dressing room in my first pair of 7 For All Mankind denim. The in house tailor pinned them up, went upstairs, hemmed them and within the hour I walked out of the store with these in my hands.



At this moment, I would have never thought that I was walking down a road that would become somewhat of an obsession. I never thought jeans would ever be a subject of conversation. I never expected to amass a collection of rare denim. I didn't think I would lay them on the ground and take pictures of them. And I certainly didn't expect that it would connect me with people I might have never spoken to otherwise.

It was a few months later when I walked back into that Nordstrom store to purchase a similar pair of 7's.

One thing I knew when searching for this second pair of jeans was that I wanted them slimmer, and the men's section just wasn't cutting it for me. In 1999, it wasn't popular for guys to shop for jeans in the women's section of the store, but the men's jeans seemed to be made for guys with a size 28 waist and 25 inch thighs. So, I would sneak up the escalator and search for the most inconspicuous entry point possible into the women's denim section. I felt like a criminal... some kind of intruder into a sacred space. In actuality, I was an explorer - charting a way for the throngs of skinny guys to follow. You can thank me in the comments section...

Purchase two:


It was around this time I met Archie. Oddly enough, we were the only two people in a group of about 150 that were wearing designer denim at a campsite. In fact, Archie was the first person I had ever even seen wearing 7s. Our conversations, and subsequent years of friendship - bound together by music and pants - only pushed me deeper into the seedy underbelly of denimology.

Next was the - now obligatory - Diesel purchase. What this pair of jeans has become is somewhat an area of pride for me. While the wash was pretty distressed from the beginning, there was virtually no physical distress on the jeans. After about 5 years of everyday wear, the knees wore through, the thighs became paper thin and the pockets started fraying.



Unfortunately, Diesel has become the bottom half of the drunken frat boy party costume. That - combined with the fragility of the jeans - has forced them into retirement.



I spent a majority of that summer in Tennessee. One weekend, my band and I traveled to Memphis and found a store on the bottom floor of the Peabody called Lansky's. This was a first introduction to regional denim - specifically Japanese denim. Japanese denim is characterized by the old world style of hand made garments and moves away from mass production into more individualized styles. What I loved about these jeans is how light they were... 9 oz, I think. I patched them until they were just worn too thin to keep going. These Paper, Denim Cloth jeans were definitely my favorite.



As new jean designers and manufacturers would come upon the scene, I'd inevitably try them on and purchase some... Antique Denim, Joe Jeans, Earnest Sewn and Rock and Republic were to follow...



But my preferences changed over time. Eventually, I started sewing in flares and cutting my jeans into new fits.



... even turing some of them into shorts...



I took a several year sabbatical from buying jeans, but a few months ago, the bug bit me again. I was back in Memphis... this time with an entirely different band, and we were talking about jeans. Sean mentioned his friend, Sam, who had purchased some APC jeans earlier that year. He said they were some type of jean that came as solid indigo and became distressed with time. I had missed a new era in the course of denim, and I was hooked again. With the internet as my guide, I found raw denim.

Eventually, Sam and I ran across each other online and were connected by this denim sickness. He led me to forums where hundreds of people from all over the world talk about how jeans are made, what kind of fabrics are used, how to wear them well, how they fit and where to find them.

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/forumdisplay.php?f=15
http://www.mynudies.com/

Since raw denim brick and mortar stores are so rare, they are next to impossible to try on before buying. So, these forums as well as conversations with other raw denim owners are necessary in making the right purchase online. My next purchase was from the Swedish company, Nudie. They are one of the only companies in the world that uses real indigo to dye their jeans, and they don't wash them before sending them to reatil - thus raw denim.

When my jeans arrived from Australia, they were completely blue. All raw denim companies suggest wearing jeans for at least six months before washing them to give them indigo opportunity to wear to the specific contours and bends of the wearer's body. After almost daily wearing for three months, here's what my Nudie's look like.



The color changing on the front of the jeans is called "whiskering" and is completely reliant upon the specific shape of me. You can see too where I keep my chapstick in my right front pocket.



The wear behind the knees is called "honeycomb" and you can see where I keep my credit cards in my back right pocket.



It's all really futile and quite ridiculous, I know. I'm not sure what has drawn me to denim over the last 9 years of my life, and I don't know what keeps me coming back. I do know that it sounds lame, but I really have made significant friends because of jeans. Like a lot of things (fixed gears, harleys, sports, music), jeans can bring people together. It's amazing that just by the insignia on the back of someone's pocket, I can make pretty accurate generalizations about who that person is or what they think about certain things in life. I guess to those who know about them, jeans can be like a secret handshake - some sort of secret society - a wink and a nod.

While I'm still a 28 (or sometimes a 27), i have grown and changed quite a bit from that first time I put on a pair of 7s in Nordstrom, and maybe my jeans - in some way - reflect that change.