How to Wash and Care for Your Selvedge and Raw Denim Jeans

How to Wash and Care for Your Selvedge Denim and Raw Denim

Another one of the old wives` tales out there is that you should never (and I mean NEVER dammit!) wash your jeans. Or if you do wash them, you should wait at least a year. And if your jeans get smelly, just put them in the freezer to kill the bacteria. Or something.

The reason people tell you not to wash your jeans is so you can achieve those wicked sweet fades in the fabric.

But all of that no-wash advice is bogus and will just leave you smelling like a hobo.

What you want to do is to strike a balance between distressing the jeans and washing out the fabric`s indigo and your fades-in-the-making too quickly, and them smelling like swamp crotch. To achieve this balance, wash them every two months. Remember, Denim Jeans are workwear. Do you think 19^th century miners were holding off on washing their jeans just so they could get fades? No, and neither should you.

While washing your Selvedge Jeans or Selvedge Jackets every 2 months might seem too frequent to a raw denim purist, it probably seems too infrequent compared with how often you`re used to washing your regular jeans. But you honestly don`t have to wash your jeans all that often. If they`ve started smelling before the 2 months is up, then giving them a wash early is a-okay.

There are a bunch of ways to wash your raw denim jeans. The easiest is to simply turn them inside out and wash them in cold water in the washing machine using Woolite. The first few times you wash your jeans, you`ll probably want to wash them by themselves to avoid the indigo bleeding onto your other clothes.

Here`s the method Josey recommends for washing your raw denim:

• Fill up a bathtub with lukewarm water
• Add a teaspoon of detergent
• Let jeans soak for 45 minutes
• Give them a bit of a scrub to remove any dirt and grime
• Rinse off with cold water
• Hang them outside to dry (if it`s raining outside, line dry them inside - just don`t use the dryer)