I stood in my living room looking at this box full of brand-new jeans that look like they’d already seen some rough days. They were ripped at the knees and faded on the butt. I was supposed to make a quilt out of them, but it all just seemed so suddenly bizarre.
There’s a funny double standard when it comes to jeans. Would a brand-new car come with dents and dings? The latest smartphone with a cracked screen straight out the box? Of course not. So why does the denim industry rip up their product before it’s even served its purpose?
The thing is that jeans have a natural lifespan and quality denim ages beautifully. It conforms to meet the contour of our bodies. Whiskers, as the denim industry has now labeled them, fade naturally across the front of the pants, and knees wear out from manual labor. But few jeans reach this state honestly anymore.
I think that’s what hit me as I pulled each pair from the box: jeans have the power to communicate a certain set of life experiences without any of the costs. Or, more simply put: they communicate privilege. We want the fades and the frays that come from hard work, but we’d prefer not to get down on our hands and knees and break in the jeans ourselves.
So what did this mean for the quilt I was to make? In the interest of being true to the material and my own artistic point-of-view, I decided I could not in good conscious do any of the following:
cut away the ripped parts (to do so was to pretend they didn’t exist)
mend the ripped parts (to do so felt like green-washing).
Ignoring the distressed elements imposed on the material would itself be disingenuous, so I decided to make the rips and frays the heart of the project. The quilt that came from that process was, in the end, the truest possible solution.
