The best jeans this season look as if they are your best-loved and oldest pair - even though they’re brand-new. That’s why Madewell, the popular jeans store at Tysons Corner Center and Westfield Annapolis mall is showing patrons how to take perfectly new jeans and distress them using a power sander, a cheese grater or plain old sandpaper.
The Tysons store, in conjunction with Washington’s Daily Candy Web site on style, recently held a clinic, Denim After Dark, to teach fashionistas how to create a time-worn look. The store hopes to have more Denim After Dark events because distressing denim is a way to show one’s creativity, says Madewell marketing director Gigi Guerra.
“We are about promoting creativity,” Ms. Guerra says. “Distressed denim is really big right now. You can choose how much you want to do and how to personalize your jeans. No one is going to have that same pair.”
Washington Daily Candy editor Erin Hartigan says the easiest way to distress a pair of jeans is to take rough-grade sandpaper and rub it on spots where jeans ordinarily would wear out first, such as the pockets, knees and back. There is no set recipe for ideal distressing, she says.
“After a while, wash the jeans and see how they look,” she says. “The fabric really needs to rest; then you can always add more.”
For quicker and more powerful distressing, Ms. Hartigan recommends renting a Dremel sander from a local hardware store. At the Denim After Dark event, Ms. Hartigan wielded a sander, showing the crowd how to create frays and holes within minutes. A hand-held cheese grater also would give a similar effect, she says.
For dramatic results, she also advises getting some trisodium phosphate (TSP) from a local paint store or online at www.wardrobesupplies.com. Add a scoop of the powder to regular laundry detergent, and in a matter of minutes, your jeans will go from looking brand-new to looking as if they’ve been washed 100 times.
“The goal is for the jeans to look old,” she says.
Well, then why not pull out a pair from 15 years ago? Because they probably would be out of style. The jeans Madewell and Daily Candy are promoting are the newest look - the boyfriend style: sort of baggy, cuffed and frayed (which is a really old style; Madonna popularized that look in the early 1980s).
But these distressed jeans are updated for today.
“This is not stonewashing,” Ms. Hartigan says. “Those jeans had a marked difference between dark and light.”
Do-it-yourself distressing has another upside - it is mistake proof, Ms. Guerra says. There is no “wrong” way to rip and fray jeans.
“Even if you mess it up, it is just a rip,” she says.
• Karen Goldberg Goff can be reached at kgoff@washingtontimes.com.
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