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Bryan Szabo and his team have spent hours poring over photos of well-worn jeans, including vintage fades with swathes of bleached fabric and high-contrast fades with knee-pit patterns of honeycomb, as well as whiskers around the crotch area. Online, the team praises the community’s top faders. “This crotch repair is crazy good!” they exclaim. Or: “Subtle and even shades… A near-perfect balancing of… fade patterns with spectacular blue tones.” This last one is the winner. For this is the judging of a competition; the Indigo Invitational, where people from across the world wear raw denim jeans for a year. But the competitors are not only the top jeans faders in the world. They are also champions of something else: The denim low-wash. Since denim becomes softer when it’s soapy and wet, one of the keys to achieving high-contrast patterns is to avoid washing them. The strategy is followed by everyone from the members of a no-wash club to the CEO of Levi’s.
For Szabo, the low-wash habit began when he bought his first pair of raw denim jeans in 2010. Traveling from his native Canada to Europe, he brought his jeans for the six-month trip. “It was a quirk about me that I had these stinky jeans,” he tells BBC Culture. “They smelled awful.” In Budapest, he met his future wife, and the jeans became a character in their relationship. “My jeans would be in, like, a pile on the floor at the end of the bed,” he remembers. “You walked into the room, you could smell [them]… I was very fortunate that my wife was as interested in me as she was.”
Among the competitors in the Indigo Invitational, which starts its fourth year next January, more than nine out of 10 participants delay the first wash of their trousers until they have been worn 150 or 200 times, Szabo estimates. “Some of these pairs, as it’s coming up on the end of the year, I wouldn’t want to handle up close,” he says. “They would probably smell wrong.” A few of his raw denim friends go even further, abiding by what he calls a “never-wash philosophy”. “[For one of them], in very tight spaces like a small elevator or something like that, if the dude is wearing certain pairs you can smell it a little bit,” he says. “Some of his best-faded examples are also displayed in jeans trade shows. [They have] an aroma… It’s not an unpleasant smell, per se, but it’s a smell.”
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(Image credit: Alamy)
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