For The New York Times Magazine's recent issue, one writer touched on the current, seen everywhere trend of ripped denim. In case you intentionally smashed your head in with a rock and knocked yourself out, erasing your memory from the past year or so, ripped jeans are fucking huge right now. Old, destroyed denim has become collectible for some people, to the point that a place in Paris takes beat-up jeans and reassembles them into new pairs for the scant price of $1,450.
Of course, the blue collar history of jeans doesn't exactly cater to those wearing them torn for fun. Jeans were for working in and once they got too roughed up, they'd be replaced. They weren't fashionable either, cut generously for mobility's sake. When ripped jeans first started gaining traction, it was as if people would buy them to "enhance their personal histories" as the piece mentions. Even just a few years ago, when raw denim was at a head, purists wouldn't like when a wearer didn't bust those knee holes open themself or personally fade the whiskers after a decade of wear. But now, it feels like the image has shifted. It's now a fashion thing.
There is, of course, the implication on clothing manufacturing that influences the destroyed denim trend. Factories use labor and materials to get those holes just perfect and if they're not, the jeans are disposed of, implying more waste. If you're hellbent on keeping with the long history that denim has, destroyed denim may be a problem in your eyes—just another problematic thing to add to the long list of problematic things in what is shaping up to be the most problematic year in the problematic history of humanity's problematic existence. But if that's one of your missions in life, crusading for denim, it sounds like you may be in need of a new hobby, like, badly.
