Why the advice on jeans is always to wash them less

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Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

Levi's 501 Original Fit Jeans

Two different conversations are having an argument about your jeans, and neither of them knows the other is in the room.

One is about raw denim: heavy, unwashed, bought stiff, worn for months to build fade contrast at the knees and thighs. The other is about a pair of stretch jeans from a high street shop that you put on for work on Thursdays.

Advice from the first conversation gets repeated in the second, where a good deal of it does not apply. Here is the part that transfers and the part that does not.

Ring dyeing, which explains most of it

Indigo does not penetrate cotton well. It sits on the outside of the yarn and leaves the core more or less white. The trade calls this a ring dye, and it is the reason denim behaves unlike any other fabric you own.

Abrasion wears through the dyed shell and shows the white underneath. That is what a fade is. It arrives at the knees, the front of the thighs, the seat, the honeycombs behind the knee, and around whatever lives in your back pocket, because those are the places that rub.

Washing lifts indigo as well, but it lifts it everywhere at once and evenly. The high points come down towards the low points and the contrast flattens.

So "never wash your jeans" is, underneath, an instruction about contrast. It is an aesthetic position. It is not a hygiene claim and it is not a durability claim, and it gets passed along as though it were both.

The reason that applies to nearly everyone: elastane

A great many jeans sold today contain elastane — often only a per cent or two, sometimes more. It is printed on the label and almost nobody reads it.

Elastane does not like heat. The tumble dryer is what fatigues it — not the wash, the dry. Fatigued elastane is what gives you knees that bag out and stay bagged, a waistband that has given up by lunchtime, a pair that fitted for two months and now fits for two hours.

Which produces the version of the advice that is genuinely useful for ordinary jeans: wash cool, wash inside out, and do not tumble dry. On a stretch pair, dryer heat costs you considerably more than wash frequency does. If you change one habit, change that one.

Fit moves, and it moves differently depending on the fabric

Rigid cotton, no stretch. It relaxes noticeably with wear — often enough to matter at the waist — and it comes most of the way back after a wash. Buy it snug, because snug is the size it will be on the day it comes out of the machine.

Stretch denim. It relaxes too, and it does not fully return. Buy stretch true to size. Buying it snug means owning a pair that fits properly for two days after every wash and is loose for the rest of the fortnight.

One more label word: shrink-to-fit, meaning unsanforised denim, which has not been pre-shrunk and will shrink substantially the first time it gets wet. Sanforised denim, which is nearly everything else, moves very little. If the tag says shrink-to-fit and you bought your usual size, you have bought a smaller pair of jeans and do not know it yet.

The freezer

It does not work.

Cold makes odour-producing bacteria dormant rather than getting rid of them, and it does nothing whatsoever to the body oils they live on. The jeans come out, they warm up, and the population picks up where it left off.

Airing them over a chair overnight does more, for a duller reason: it dries out the damp environment those bacteria need. Dull mechanisms are usually the ones that work.

Hygiene, without the sermon

There is no moral position here worth taking, but there is a practical one. Sweat and skin oil oxidise in cotton over time. Left long enough they set into the fibre, stop coming out, and in quantity they weaken it.

The position that survives both extremes is unglamorous: air them after wearing, spot-clean whatever lands on them, and give them a cold wash inside out every ten wears or so. That is markedly less washing than most people do and rather more than the internet recommends.

Repair is cheaper than replacement, and always has been

Denim goes at the crotch and the knee first, because that is where the fabric is worked hardest. A blowout patched early — a backing patch and a run of darning stitches, by hand or on a machine — is a small job at a small price. The same hole ignored for a fortnight is a large job, and the repair shows more.

What washing less will not do

It will not make a poor pair of jeans last. Thin fabric, short fibre and a weak seam are decided at the mill and cannot be laundered into something else.

It will not fix the fit. Not washing a pair that does not fit gives you an unwashed pair that does not fit.

It will not lift a stain that has set. Stains are the exception to all of this. Go at those immediately, and cold.

And it will not produce fades on stretch denim. Contrast needs a heavy, ring-dyed, rigid fabric. An elastane core and a lighter weight will not develop it however patient you are, and waiting six months to find that out is a long six months.

The one thing that decides how long a pair lasts

The dryer, or rather not using it. Everything else on this page is a preference. That one is free, it works on both kinds of jeans, and it is the only instruction here worth following without argument.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.

The product

It is the reference point the rest of this page is describing — a rigid, ring-dyed, non-stretch cut that has been made for well over a century, which is why fade behaviour tends to get discussed in its terms. Check the composition on the specific wash before buying, because some colourways now carry a little elastane and those do not behave the same way.

The one people are searching for is the Levi's 501 Original Fit Jeans.

Levi's 501 Original Fit Jeans

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.