Posted on 12/29/2023 3:39:38 PM PST by nickcarraway
There's a growing cohort of people who believe in washing clothes less – or not at all. Matilda Welin talks to the 'no-wash' and 'low-wash' believers.
Bryan Szabo and his team have spent hours poring over photos of well-worn jeans, including vintage fades with swathes of bleached fabric and high-contrast fades with knee-pit patterns of honeycomb as well as whiskers around the crotch area. Online, the team praises the community's top faders. "This crotch repair is crazy good!" they exclaim. Or: "Subtle and even shades... A near-perfect balancing of... fade patterns with spectacular blue tones." This last one is the winner. For this is the judging of a competition; the Indigo Invitational, where people from across the world wear raw denim jeans for a year. But the competitors are not only the top jeans faders in the world. They are also champions of something else: The denim low-wash. Since denim becomes softer when it’s soapy and wet, one of the keys to achieving high-contrast patterns is to avoid washing them. The strategy is followed by everyone from the members of a no-wash club to the CEO of Levi's.
For Szabo, the low-wash habit began when he bought his first pair of raw denim jeans in 2010. Travelling from his native Canada to Europe, he brought his jeans for the six-month trip. "It was a quirk about me that I had these stinky jeans," he tells BBC Culture. "They smelled awful." In Budapest he met his future wife, and the jeans became a character in their relationship. "My jeans would be in, like, a pile on the floor at the end of the bed," he remembers. "You walked into the room, you could smell [them]... I was very fortunate that my wife was as interested in me as she was."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
“When I was a child, I thought like a child, acted like a child, when I became a man, I put away childish things”
1 Corinthians 13
“I prefer the top loaders and lots of water.”
When we bought this house, the owners left their washer and dryer not even a year old. It was a high-end fancy-schmantzy high efficiency top loading Jennair washer. You can connect it to the Internet and cell phone to be notified when the load is finished. 🙄
We tested it before we got rid of our old Kenmore set. The water never covered all the clothes unless you added buckets of water manually. There was no agitator. The clothes were dingy and didn’t smell clean. You couldn’t select a second rinse cycle.
After two weeks, we gave the set to the handyman helping us get settled. I know the washer sold for about $2200 because they left the invoices.
So we have our 10-year-old set back. Agitator and all.
These people never worked with their hands, backs, legs and muscles. Spend a July day roofing or a day hauling in coastal fish or working on cars and tell me you won’t wash your clothes.
A front loader is far easier on clothing of any sort. They just pick the clothes up and drop them so only their own wet weight impacts the water, rather than beating the fabric through the water.
See my #44
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