I am fed up with the inflation of fake old,'mechanically modified jeans'. Apart from my personal taste, I think these fake jeans tell us something about our society.
1. Worn jeans tell a story, workers and farmer's jeans look different to office workers jeans. Shops sell the jeans of manual workers, not of the brain workers. How comes that everyone prefers the manual workers jeans?
2. Worn jeans tell a story of action. Running around, a nail tears a hole while building a shed, being on your knees, having cigarette packs in your back pocket. We like a story but have no time, courage, occassion to live the story ourselves. So we outsource the story and just fake the result. And the jeans-story-telling is outsourced to machines and chemical substances.
3. It is an example of our consumer society going mad. Everything needs to be immediate. We cannot even wait to wear out a pair of trousers. We need to have a selection of them at various stages of wear. Will this set the example for other industries? Will we see cars with worn out seats and scratches for double the price of a new car?
Proposal:
If you like jeans with a story, buy at least jeans with a human story. Buy second hand. Or, start a project where new jeans are worn for a few months by those who like new trousers and cannot afford them. After a few month hard wearing they get a new pair and the jeans with a human story are sold of to the people who like the story but have no time to go through the process.
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