Adventures in raw denim

So when The Fashion Spot went down a few weeks ago, I wandered elsewhere for my fashion fix. Lo, there's Supertalk, a mostly boys' forum for street style.

I got hooked into the raw denim discussion. Apparently, this is one of the few safe areas for fashion obsession available to guys. It's where you get denim in the raw, unwashed state, and break them in yourself.

A few points I picked up:
. Nudies and APC brands seem the most popular, and then there are the more esoteric Japanese brands
. Looms...Levis's sold theirs to the Japanese in the 80s, and this was a very bad thing.
. You want to wait as long as possible before washing, to increase the contrast in wear marks. Six months seem to be the target mark.
. Of course, your denim will start to stink. Febreze is the method of choice.
. Detergent--Woolite Black, Dr. Bonners, nothing, or esoteric Japanese denim soap.
. Temperature of the water should be either 40C or 60C, depending on how dark you want your denim to remain. A soak and rinse then hang up.
. Don't fold your denim. They must be hung up.
. Get them as tight as possible so they shape to you. This also speeds up the breaking in process.
. Wait about 6 mos before the first wash. About 120 wearings. Some folks track this with tick marks. I'm considering a spreadsheet.
. Pics of the breaking in process is referred to as denim porn, complete with crotch shots. I guess so that you can see the hige.
. Hige: the wear marks radiating from the crotch. Honeycomb: the creasing behind the knees.

And it goes on.

I don't think girls get into this as much. For one thing, they are not so sartorially boxed into a corner. We've got other things to satisfy our creativity, like color. Even the trad style adherents (see Style Forum) obsess over tiny details of "purity." Also, I think girls care about the fit and trendiness of things over than anything else.

In any case, I decided at some point to start my own denim project. I was completely unenamored with the ridiculous washes of women's denim, anyway, and had been looking for a dark wash skinnyish jean for awhile.

The APC arrived the other day. I've been wearing them around the house first. They're stiff, and there's a little bit of a sheen to them. I had to have the boy help button me up at first, and he couldn't do it on the first try. But they're already starting to relax. I'll post pics of their progress as time goes by.