Distressing Denim

Part of my investigation into jean-style jackets has involved exploring how the 'wearing' and 'wearing out' of the garments adds to their attraction especially amongst youth subcultures.  I use 'wearing' to mean changes that happen through normal use and 'wearing out' to mean purposeful attempts to distress the garments. So I have played about with a range of paper, paint and wool to develop the natural and the purposeful fraying and fading of denim.

I've looked at how the fabric looks in close up as it wears and fades:

Gouache focusing on the magnified weave

I experimented with how wear begins to fray the material. The pattern above was created by painting onto the fringed tapestry cloth below and 'printing' it onto a gouache ground.  I like the effect but it doesn't really resemble my stimulus material.

An alternative was to create a more distinctive surface to print from so I wound up a piece of frayed linen and rolled that in paint and then on the same indigo ground.  The resulting pattern is stronger but perhaps not as interesting.

I also tried using wool on the same ground in different ways:

The piece on the right was a preliminary stage in creating tufted edges as they occur on worn denim but I rather like the crisscross effect of the wool and the bent shapes.  The next stage was to cut away the card as when a pompom emerges from the winding stage:

The result is too fluffy and the white dominates.  Another time, I would reduce the wool to create an image with better balance of hues.

Finally, I used the scraps from the experiment above to create something equally 3D.  Thanks to Helen Farrar, Bradford School of Art archivist for suggesting I keep the wet wipes I used for cleaning some indigo dye from my hands.  I combined them with the scraps of wool to create a visualisation of the slashes and frays that can be seen in 'worn, and 'worn out' denim.