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 ...
Hippies. /smirk
“All things old are new again. Hippies.”
Yes and no. Back then, they weren’t FORCED into wearing dirty clothes, but now, given the cost of energy in the UK (thanks to the Neocon War in Ukraine), many don’t have much choice, and likewise they’re also unplugging refrigerators.
They’re quickly reverting to a pre-industrial society, and just maybe they’ll figure it out, maybe.
Not only do I wash my clothes, I use starch and iron my nice Church clothes.
Jeans are something that longer with a rinse and air dry than getting beaten to death in a washer and dryer. Of course, getting them dirty (real dirt) requires a wash. Otherwise, you can wear them for a while without a run through the machine.
What America used to be:
Roaring 20s New York Life Restored to Color and Sound
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKEkvInhIU
“Ways to put the Funk back into the Wagnal.”
from Diaries of a Lazy American Schlump.
Torn jeans and now filthy jeans (the article mentions wearing jeans 150 to 200 times before washing).
“until they have been worn 150 or 200 times, Szabo estimates. “Some of these pairs, as it’s coming up on the end of the year, I wouldn’t want to handle up close,” he says. “They would probably smell wrong.” A few of his raw denim friends go even further, abiding by what he calls a “never-wash philosophy”. “[For one of them], in very tight spaces like a small elevator or something like that, if the dude is wearing certain pairs you can smell it a little bit,” he says. “Some of his best faded examples are also displayed in jeans trade shows. [They have] an aroma... It’s not an unpleasant smell, per se, but it’s a smell.”
It will save water just like low flow toilets.
No thanks.....
One can wash them by hand. You can also dry them outside. Not a lot of water used.
Been wondering why the big ad buy for LUME.
Now clear.
Next big propaganda move by greens.
I line dry everything I can as long as I can.
Then I throw it in the dryer to de-bug them and soften them a bit.
Towels I try to catch just slightly damp so they soften up, too.
Well, I think the article is intermingling two groups here. There’s the raw denim crowd who avoid washing their jeans in order to get the best wear patterns. This was kind of a Millennial thing and peaked probably seven or eight years ago. Then there’s the no-wash people who avoid washing for reasons of wokeness. This seems to be a newer trend.
Here in Arizona you can tell some of the snowbirds believe in this.
It’d take a chick from Budapest to deal with that.
Back before air conditioning and antiperspirant or deodorant.
Embrace the funk...
I saw a Forensic Files once that identified a masked bank robber by the wear pattern in his jeans…interesting .
..
I saw a Forensic Files once that identified a masked bank robber by the wear pattern in his jeans…interesting .
..
Yep, they’ve even got names for the patterns. Whiskers are the lines formed by wrinkling at the hip joint and honeycomb is the pattern on the back of the knee...
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