Mirror, Mirror…Thoughts on Raw Denim

By John Michael Thornton

If you read man-blogs for long enough—I’m talking about blogs like “Valet,” “Kempt,” or my personal drug of choice, Jesse Thorn’s “Put This On”—strange things begin to seem strangely reasonable. Call me a traditionalist, but the only time a man should wear a neckerchief is when he’s earning a merit badge or chucking rocks at an Israeli tank.

In my case, the insanity took the form of raw denim jeans. One day, my brain began whispering how they would be useful, not lavish; authentic; personal; an investment in quality. In short, the exact same hustle you see fifty times during Monday Night Football, when millions of white-collar suburbanites suddenly decide they need a Ford F-150. (The global warming comes extra.)

For the uninitiated—and it is an initiation—the “raw” in “raw denim” means the cloth has never been washed and thus will fade to reflect your movements. However, after wearing them for half an hour you’d be forgiven for assuming that “raw” refers to your thighs, which look like uncooked hamburger. (Think of it as a sacrifice to the Fashion Gods, ensuring that next year’s crops will come up shapely and colorful.) I’m not sure whether the rawness makes these jeans more or less manly; on the one hand, a pair of jeans without a designer fade isn’t allowed within a thousand yards of John Galliano. On the other, raw denim comes with care instructions that would make a cashmere sweater cough “Pussy!”

When I first read these instructions (cold wash, separately, inside out, air dry) I said, “Fuck this! I’ll warm wash and tumble dry till I die, motherfucker!” Yet such was the power of the man-blog that twenty minutes later, I was standing in the shower wearing my jeans, watching blue dye swirl down the drain as if Rob Zombie had remade Psycho starring Smurfette.

The collective wisdom of the internet says the proper way to break in a pair of raw denim is as follows:

1)    Soak in a hot bath while wearing your jeans. Warning: More than one commenter suffered second-degree burns using this method.

2)    Apologize to your girlfriend for permanently staining your bathtub. Point out that this is why people rent rather than buy.

3)    Ride your bike around town while wearing your wet jeans. This will allow them to stretch and shrink to your exact shape, and as an added bonus, the trail of blue dye will lead the search party right to you after you get the crap beat out of you in the part of town that doesn’t read man-blogs.

4)    Wear your jeans every day, all day, until they feel as comfortable as sweatpants. Of course until that time, you’ll be in agony from the chafing, and anybody who says otherwise has Stockholm Syndrome.

5)   Only wash your jeans every six months to a year, by hand, in your tub, with Woolite Dark, while chewing on a cocoa leaf and listening to a Grateful Dead bootleg. Then let them air dry which, here in San Francisco, takes about 4-6 weeks.

Why would anybody do all this? Everybody knows that people on the internet are idiots. (For some reason, I also imagine them to be sticky, like children covered in jam.) Regardless, when enough idiots yell in unison, it begins to resemble wisdom. Or at least that’s what our Founding Fathers would have us believe. So I did it, every step, and I’m happy to report that if you follow this program of care, the sticky children are right: You will have a perfect pair of jeans. They will be fitted to your exact size and shape. They will be faded to reflect your lifestyle. And they will have a prodigious funk from not having been washed in a year that rivals the wookiee arm you pull out of your shower drain when the water begins to pool.

“Why?” you may be asking, “would you do this to yourself and to the world? A pair of Wranglers costs twenty bucks, leaves no scars, and doesn’t smell like the dark water.”

Because raw denim does make a great jean. They do fit better, they’re more durable, and I can stoically point to a faded spot and proudly proclaim This is where I wipe my boogies. But in truth, my friends, it’s the fault of the man-blog, kindling desire for unnecessary things. People do crazy things for love. And self-love? That’s even crazier.