I hang-dry some things, I have noticed jeans last significantly longer when not dried in a dryer.
You wear your jeans out? I haven’t lost a pair of jeans in years. Then again, I stopped buying a few because the fabric is so thin and the stitching quality horrific.
I do enjoy my modern washer and dryer though. 3 years old so far, and the dryer steam function is a real last minute saver.
For many years my mother washed clothes and dried them on the backyard clothes line. Now I wash and dry clothes via machine. What texture do you mean? I notice no difference.
Maybe it’s some property of the laundry room but whenever I’ve hung-dried my clothes (mostly during the time there were no working dryers in our building) they end up all stiff and crinkly, whereas out of the dryer they’re lovely and warm and loose. And no, I don’t use any special dryer sheets or anything.
Outside or inside? Curious.
Drying jeans outside made them stiff as boards - I tried doing this for a summer in the country,15 or so years ago.
The last couple years or so I’ve started using dryer sheets for the first time. I feel guilty about it, just creating more waste (though the volume of waste created using dryer sheets vs everything else I do living on earth is a pretty small amount). They really cut down on the static cling and help get the wrinkles out. There are some biodegradable dryer sheets, but I don’t like their scent.
This is in the building laundry room, which has like four clotheslines for people too cheap to drop a few quarters in the dryer. Or who unaccountably prefer it for some reason. Or, like I say, when neither of the dryers was working.
I second the horrible texture of line-dried clothes. My aunt has never had a dryer (well, maybe in the past 10 years, but never when I was growing up) and would hang things outside to dry. It was okay for some things I suppose, but I always remember her towels were like boards. Stiff and scratchy is the texture I remember.
I do. It depends on the brand though. I buy cheap jeans, which is probably the issue. Typically the things that wear out are the same, so it’s how I wear them and use them most likely.
I’ve definitely worn jeans out. I mostly buy Levis raw denim these days, cuz I’m a cheap hipster like that. But a pair of 501 Shrink-to-Fits is like $30-40 on a good day at the outlet mall, so it’s not that bad. But a pair of grey ones I wore as my “daily duty” jeans for weekends, concerts, nighttime outtings with the gf, etc., for about 3 years finally just got worn down and decolored, even with very infrequent washing (part of the care guidelines for raw denim).
To be fair, most of the actual physical damage came to the hemline, since I’m a fucking midget but still insist on sometimes buying 32L pants just so I can rip em up with the backs of my shoes. I’m folding over the bottoms now on my new pair of identical jeans, and a year in, they’re in amazing shape.
I’m sure the no-machine-drying and infrequent-washing things contribute to their longevity far more than the actual quality at work here.
For me it’s the back hemline as well that first wears out. I’m an odd height, and jeans are usually even lengths, so instead of tailoring, I just get longer jeans, and the back will catch on my shoe back or top of the heel, etc.
I also slowly wear out other common areas but the hemline is the most common. I should have mine tailored.
Yeah. The whole pant-rolling thing is kinda fashionable now (or was 3 years ago the last time I tried to give a shit about my appearance), so at least there’s that!
Oh, I also ripped one of the belt straps off because I am always tugging my pants up because. . . I refuse to wear a belt. I think there’s some sort of irony at work here.
There’s your excuse to wear suspenders unironically.
Preferably with lederhosen.
If you have easy access to a dryer, and line dry just for the efficiency/ cost reasons, you can always line dry, then toss into the dryer with a wet washcloth for like 5 minutes once they’re dry. It sort of steams/refreshes them, and they get rid of most of the stiffness. I assume that’s also easier on them than a full dryer cycle.
I don’t know what the “common” wear-out points for jeans are, but mine last about a year or two of daily-ish wear before the fabric just below the crotch starts wearing out (where my thighs touch each other, presumably). But, I also walk more than the average person, (public transit commute) so that may be part of it.
More expensive jeans, in my experience, have thinner, more fashionable denim and actually wear out faster, so there’s a pretty hard upper bound on what I’ll spend on jeans.
Expensive raw/selvege denim is usually made of much higher weight and sturdier fabric. For some lines, the extreme density is even a selling point. They’re worth exploring if you want extreme durability without sacrificing the stylish cuts and colors you’d lose with, say, industrial-aimed work pants.
Well, at this point I know an exact brand and cut that fits me adequately, so I’m okay with my biannual or so refresh cycle.
Plus, like, one of the perks of getting older is not really caring what you look like any more.
Also, the entire fashion industry is a blight on humanity. 500 different brands of essentially identical product and untold millions spent trying to differentiate them via marketing. Whenever I go clothes shopping, I just wish we lived in a communist utopia and I could just go and order “1 casual clothes, male, large” and be done with it. (I mean it doesn’t have to just be one style. I’d accept like, half a dozen styles of “casual clothes”.)
I mean you’re talking to a guy who wants nothing more than to be allowed to wear metal band shirts, JNCO-style baggy jeans (cuz they’re comfortable as shit), and big puffy soft skater shoes every day for the rest of his life. I just wanted to point out that loom-weaved selvege denim is actually a pretty legit fabric compared to the flimsy stuff Wranglers are spun out of by underpaid Thai children or what have you (but I still don’t own any of it cuz dropping $100+ on jeans, even jeans that will survive half a decade easily, still isn’t up my particular alley).
Listening to you two talk about clothes makes me sad. I am not envision all those movies I watched as a kid about workers in Russia, who wore the same drab clothes and were never happy.
Is it possible to find a non HE washer anymore? All I have come across is the Speed Queen brand.
Our current 22 year old Maytag is near death, it uses a crazy 30+ gallons per load, this is what I am use to, I just cannot see how a new HE washer is going to clean my mud / mulch / yard filth from my work jeans in the spring.