GARMENT WASHING AND FINISHING JEANS FACTORY CHINA
We want most of our garments to look new. But not our jeans. Althoughjeans are raw in heritage fashion, the majority of all jeans sold worldwide come pre-faded, with industrial washing and finishing techniques used to replicate the highly desired naturally worn-in look. The distinction of heritage fashion and the raw denim culture is that we do not necessarily
want others to fade our jeans fo us.
If you think about pre-washed,faded, or finished Jeans, stonewashing comes to mind. And the name is no lie：the jeans really are washed with stones.Getting the right ones was not always easy, as industry veteran Panagiotis Sofianos recalls”When we had to do the first stonewash in Greece in the early 1980s, we needed a source for pumice stones.The best came from a volcanic island called Nisyros. The only supplier there refused to sell more than kw kilograms to us because he could not believe we were really looking for material for industrially laundering jeans. We had to lie, Slying that the pumice would be used for insulation in ovens.”It may seem like a lot of trouble in this raw denim renaissance,but industrial washing has been an important part of the denim industry in years past
WHY WE TALK ABOUT INDUSTRIALLY WASHED JEANS
The raw denim craze that started in the 2000s,not to be confused with the first epoch of raw denim in the 1980s,has birthed a niche of consumers who are opting out of industrially washed and distressed jeans.Still, most jeans sold today get their worn-in look in a factory.But it is not usually a simple matter of just washing the jeans a little,Laundering and distressing jeans has become a billion-dollar branch of the denim business with laundries all around the world ,highly advanced technology,and substantial consumption of bothe natural and human resources as well as chemicals.
As Andrew Olah puts it,”denim is a dirty industry,”and that is why it is relevant to discuss garment finishing, whether you like how it looks or not.The consequences,like everything else that affects the environment,have a global impact and are not merely limited to the local communities where factory washed and distressed jeans are made,Let us strar from the beginnig and look at how garment finishing for jeans has evolved since its early days in the 1960s
THE HISTORY OF GARMENT FINISHING FOR JEANS
All jeans start as raw denim jeans.The difference between the crispy raw denim jeans that aficionados have come to favor and the soft and already worn-in jeans that most people wear is that the latter are industrially finished to offer a washed and distressed apperance right off the shelf,But jeans do not actually need this process-they are perfectly fine and ready to wear when they leave the cutting and sewing stage of production.And until the 1960s,all new jeans came unwashed and raw (albeit many were sanforized and thereby pre-shrunk).But outside of the U.S..,new jeans were often hard to get your hands on.The American G.I.’squite unknowingly created what would become a denim craze in Europe and Asia,particularly in Japan,when they discarded worn denim jeans,which were picked up by locals,They indirectly created thriving black market dealing in secondhand items of off-duty clothing,particularly the tough blue pants the soldiers wore,The jeans,like many of the other commodities that provided the U.S.soldiers with comfort and a memory of home, became a symbol of freedom and the American way oflife.
The result was that Europeans and Japanese first came to know and love denim in its worn and washed version When secondhand denim became and established business,all of the jeans were washed for sanitary reasons.Local brands and retailers thus found it surprisingly difficult to sell new,unwashed jeans when they were first introduced in the mid -1960s.Around this time ,Frenchman francois girbaud helped open the Western House boutique on the classy Avenue de la Grande Armee in central Paris ,which,as one of the very first jeans bastions in the city,stocked all the authentic cowboy gear he dreamt of growing up.”It was like little America in Paris,”he recalls .While the aspiring denim innovator personally loved the original unwashed style of jeans,not everyone else felt that way.The clientele wash not accustomed to this rough kind of denim and they would
ask for the worn-in style that Girbaud was wearing, not believing that the jeans would naturally transform with a little wash and wear,Instinctively,acting in accordance with the principle that the “customer is always right,”Girbaud began washing the jeans. At first, he did it at a launderette .But soon one of his Western House partners arranged for the jeans to be washed at an industrial laundry in the city.
The jeans sold at double the price. Although the indigo dye of the heavy denim damaged the machines, which were normally used for sheets-the owner of the laundry was hardly pleased-Girbaud instantly knew he was on to something with huge potential.To accelerate the fading of the jeans,he experimented with rocks sand, and other abrading substances until he discovered pumice stone in a beauty store in Italy,which did the job perfectly.Although Girbaud may not have been the first to stonewash jeans-Gul&Bla in Sweden and Edwin in japan were experimenting with similar techniques at the same time-he believes that he was indeed the first to industrialize the washing of jeans to purposely age the garment. By the time the Berlin Wall fell-an era when heavily bleached and chemically distressed jeans began to flood the market-Girbaud came to the conclusion that the branch of the denim business he had helped create was not exactly a clean one.The French provocateur was so moved that he publicly stated that”jeans are dead,”much to the dislike of MF corporation,who he decided to start working on alternatives to resoure-guzzling denim garment finishes together with jeanologia