Getting That Vintage Look
What does it take to make brand-new jeans look old and lived in? A little creative destruction at a bizarre California factory
By Joel Stein/Los Angeles
NEIL A. FRANCE FOR TIME Let 'er rip! A section of the Spray Robot, one of the odd machines
used to customize jeans–at a cost of up to $50 a pair
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Summer 2005 Style & Design
I can only imagine what the letters home to Mexico read like: "I'm
sending money from my new factory job! We get the most expensive denim
jeans in the world, and then we take sandpaper, oil, hammers and pumice
stones and destroy them by hand. It seems Americans like their jeans to
look old but don't want to wait. So they pay us to do it for them. I
dream of a day when I can work my way up to shredding couture gowns for
a living. Love, Pedro."
International Garment Finish in Long Beach, Calif., is one of the few
factories in the world whose sole purpose is to destroy things. DKNY,
Armani Exchange, Abercrombie & Fitch, Habitual, Yanuk, Tag and Taverniti
all send their jeans here for what is called "denim washing." And there
is some actual washing done (though it's in giant, $80,000 Italian
washing machines filled with stones that pound the bejeezus out of the
jeans). But there are also lasers burning away paint, tools grinding
holes, brushes dipped in potassium permanganate replicating dirt stains,
plastic staplers making wrinkles, 290?F ovens for baking in creases and
a belt sander for fraying hems and pockets and ripping big holes in
knees. It looks like a shop class taken over by David Letterman.
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Beating up jeans is serious business, since it's what allows retailers
to charge hundreds of dollars for a pair of denim pants. "A wash can
take a jean from a junior line to a premium. Introducing a new wash can
double or triple our business," says Nicole Garrett, who along with
husband Michael Colovos owns Habitual, which produces jeans that sell
out of Barneys and Fred Segal. "What distinguishes denim is fit and
wash. That's your business."
Making a jean look convincingly vintage is so crucial that in order to
discover every wrinkle and fade, Colovos has been wearing the same pair
of jeans every day for eight months. Without washing them.
"Surprisingly, they don't smell that bad. In a weird way, they kind of
smell new," Colovos says before his wife looks at him askew. "I don't
know about new," she says, "but I can sit in the same car." The Habitual
men's line, whose debut is set for next spring, will try to reproduce
each idiosyncratic stain and line in Colovos' skanky jeans, including
the wallet impression in his front pocket.
The designers from Abercrombie & Fitch are equally committed to realism,
often camping out at International Garment Finish for weeks and debating
every rip. Five years ago, the factory treated 20,000 jeans a day at an
average of $3.25 a jean. But with washes getting more detailed, it's
down to 5,000 a day and charges an average of $7. For Taverniti jeans,
the wash is so complicated that the factory charges $50 a pair for the
16-hr. process. Demand for jean decimation is growing so fast that
International Garment Finish is building a second factory in Mexico.
Wash technology exploded in 1995 when designer Jerome Dahan of Seven for
All Mankind invented "whiskers," those now ubiquitous little white lines
running across the legs that look like a wrinkle fade. Many of the
factory's 260 employees spend all day standing in front of blown-up
rubber legs, slipping on jeans and rubbing in whiskers with sandpaper.
Recently David Johnson, an artist among washers and the top R&D guy at
International Garment Finish, created what he calls "vintage whiskers,"
which are curved and, he believes, give a more realistic,
three-dimensional look. All this makes about as much sense to me as
having an entire factory to break in your baseball cap for you. "We do
that too," says Johnson, who frayed hats for the collection J. Lo showed
at her fashion show.
It was about then that I looked down at Johnson's impressively worn
jeans and asked him where he buys his.
"My wife works at Costco," he says, "so I get those."
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