There were three experts and then there was me, on the fringe. We huddled in chill February air around a clutch of worksheets made for ranking denim; a scale from 1 to 5, which referred to a host of measures I’d neither heard of before nor would have considered valuable had it crossed my mind. Lined up along the sidewalk, backs to the brick, stood seventeen bold humans, in seventeen pairs of admirably worn-in jeans. It was our job, experts plus me, to judge.
The reason? Gastown’s dutil. Denim runs a yearly “Fade-In Contest,” in which the moderately cultish world of raw denim celebrates fidelity to the jean.
If you don’t wash your raw denim jeans for a year, maybe more, then they will be rank and dutil. Denim will rank them. There were actually a total of seven judges, since dutil. runs an online version of the contest as well. But for our in-store purposes, there were just us four, and I’ll happily admit that I was hopelessly outclassed.
These are men of passionate expertise, whose sartorial acumen is second only to their deep understanding of denim production processes: where the cotton is grown, how the cloth is manufactured and under what conditions the prototype is tested. These are men whose business cards reflect their denim-based ideologies: a penchant for durability, weight and style. Matt Townsend, from Nudie Jeans, David Strong from Freenote Cloth, and Jeffrey Lee from Doublewood Project each came, in their own ways, close to proselytizing, so fervent was their belief in their product.
And why not? If blue jeans are the most democratic of wearables, then these hard-working, sophisticated men were making a claim for inclusivity even as they made clear that raw denim is about one thing, and one thing only: that those who wear it be passionate, too. So passionate, in fact, that the prohibition against washing has been elevated to an art.
Perhaps not democracy, then, but pure meritocracy.
For the measure of a perfect pair is contrast, which means preserving that dye—never letting it seep out in the wash—in all the right places, and letting the white of the weft come through in others.
The marks of a perfectly worn-in pair of raw denim jeans? Patterns of wear and preserved dye that attest to the patterns of a body in motion. Honey-combing, behind the knees, from the denim bending and crinkling; whiskering, a kind of starbursting out from the top of the thigh and over the front pockets, which is produced by sitting, bending at the waist, picking up that which has fallen, tying your shoes. There is stacking, marks that form when the jeans are too long and bunch along the ankles, and then there is pocket fade, front or back, in the shape (almost exclusively) of an iPhone.
The winners walked away with new jeans, c/o the brand sponsors, and I walked away with a sense that, if one means to live a life of strong and passionate ideals, one could do worse that to take up selvedge denim as a symbol of that intention.