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Raw denim 
One year, one pair, zero washes
story Katrina Nattress | photo Katie Onheiber
On June 2, 2007, Sean McKeen awoke in his underwear for the first time in weeks. He felt strange without the familiar pull of denim around his legs, but if he could sit in a chair and smell himself, it was time to freeze his jeans. Yesterday, it was time.
He got out of bed; his long knobby legs feeling oddly exposed as his bare feet thumped on the hardwood floor. His dreadlocks bounced on his back. When he arrived at the freezer he pulled out a bag heavy with denim. “Freezing your jeans helps with the smell,” he says. “I usually freeze mine every two to four weeks. If that doesn’t work, I Febreze them.” McKeen grabbed the jeans and shoved them into his face. He inhaled, satisfied that they no longer smelled like sweat, grime, fart, boy, and overall gnarliness. Though they were still stiff and frozen, McKeen pulled them on: the cool denim felt good on the summer morning. It was the start of the 310th day of McKeen and his jeans.
On August 21, 2006, McKeen began The Raw Denim Jeans Project — customizing your jeans by not washing them for a year — with his friend and fellow denim enthusiast Michael Gardner. It was Gardner who opened McKeen’s eyes to raw denim, convincing him to try on a pair of Iron Army jeans at Portland’s Johnny Sole boutique. As the Foo Fighter t-shirt-clad vegan stood in the dressing room, assessing each pair of Iron Army jeans in the mirror, he thought of the artistic possibilities raw denim presented.
Raw denim jeans come straight from the loom, which makes them extremely stiff and dark. “Over time, your body forms creases in the jeans that fades the dye in those particular places, making more of a personal mark on your jeans,” explains Gardner. The jeans fit unlike any McKeen had worn before. Snug and stiff, they hugged his legs as if they were made specifically for his body. He gladly forked over $170 for the Hiro Straight Leg Raws, one of Iron Army’s most popular cuts. Within the first month, the rigidity disappeared, leaving McKeen with the form-fitting jeans he calls his “second skin.”
Though McKeen may not sound like the typical wearer of designer jeans — his mother claims he shopped at Goodwill in high school — he has always been one for commitment. “If he makes a commitment he will follow through,” says Marcella Owsley, McKeen’s girlfriend. She points out that the twenty-three-year-old has been growing his dreadlocks for five years and has been under the needle for over twenty hours in order to complete a tattoo of the Milky Way galaxy that spans the left side of his body, beginning under his armpit and wrapping around his thigh to end near his pelvis.
It is advised not to wash raw denim for a few months upon purchase, but McKeen had been studying Nam Jun Paik, a Korean artist whose performances span the course of a year and have included him tying himself to a woman with a 6-foot rope but not being able to touch her. Fascinated by Paik’s time-based art, McKeen, an Oregon State University art student, raised the non-washing time to a year. He also decided to extend the project to four years, changing the pair of jeans annually when the members (four total for round one) congregate for the first washing.
By March 2007, Gardner and McKeen had recruited another member for the Raw Denim Jeans Project: Frankie Flatch. Like McKeen, Flatch is not usually one to spend hundreds of dollars on clothing, but says it’s not just about personalizing a pair of pants. “I am willing to spend more if I know the workers are treated fairly,” says Flatch of Iron Army.
In 2004 Steve Opperman and Steve Dubbeldam established Iron Army, the now defunct brand used for year one of the project. The two purchased old jeans at thrift stores and customized them in their hometown, Edmonton, Canada. When their out-of-the-garage designs grew in popularity, the duo was forced to move production to Los Angeles. In an effort to oversee operations and ensure fair payment and employee working conditions, they moved too.
The Raw Denim Jeans Project — like the efforts of urban hipsters to mainstream organic fabrics and support local, handmade clothing — fuels the movement to look at clothing as part of a social statement and ecological responsibility. McKeen, Gardner, and Flatch may be on the fringes, but they’re not alone in their attempt to think a little more about the impact fashion has on the environment. According to The NPD Group, a consumer and retail market research firm, 27 percent of consumers polled in 2007 were interested in eco-friendly brands and retail, a leap from just 6 percent in 2002.
Gardner sees green fashion, and raw denim, as a subculture, and believes the benefits outweigh the jeans’ price tag. “To me it’s like collecting action figures or baseball cards,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle.” A lifestyle, it turns out, with its own look, feel, and smell.
At two o’clock in the morning on a humid summer night, McKeen stood in a sweatshirt, boxers, and socks tagging a building in downtown Portland with stencils declaring “Raw Denim Jeans Project August 21, 20.” He taped his jeans to the wall with “07” painted in white on the left back pocket, completing the phrase and rendering him pantless because, of course, he didn’t think to bring an extra pair on his excursion.
McKeen uses his street art to remind the city of his project and hopefully open some eyes to raw denim. He plans to implement supplemental urban art in each year of the project. “It’s a big commitment and a lot of people think I’m crazy,” says the denim fanatic, who is willing to pay up to $800 for a pair of jeans in upcoming years. “I want people to know what I’m doing.”
By the twelfth month of the project, not even freezing could save the jeans. “The last month [of the project] was equivalent to the first eleven combined,” recalls McKeen. The jeans were subject to beer, vomit, paint, and construction work all in the course of thirty days. “If you were to take them off and put them up to your face, you’d immediately pull back,” he says. “It was a foul, rotten trespassing of the senses.”
On August 21, 2007, McKeen, Gardner, and Flatch stand in their boxers, Budweisers in hand, at Flatch’s southeast Portland home. They hold their jeans in front of them, admiring twelve months’ worth of creases, fading, and stains. Their jeans see the inside of a washing machine for the first time, finally being cleansed of the disgusting substances that have been absorbed into the denim in the past year. McKeen makes sure the first wash isn’t too harsh by using special detergent made in Japan. Unable to read the directions (they are in Japanese, after all), he dumps the contents of the packet into the washer. Once the buzzer sounds, they hang the jeans to dry in Flatch’s shower. “This is the conclusion of a year’s amount of work,” says McKeen. “I feel accomplished.”
In Flatch’s bathroom the water dripping from the denim is a mixture of blue and brown from the indigo dye and dirt collected over the year. The dye has faded in areas, leaving the color of the jeans uneven. Each pair is unique, formed by the body of its owner. Honeycomb creases permanently form under the knee. A small hole is burned in the left thigh of McKeen’s jeans from an experiment testing whether raw denim is flammable. It is.
As the jeans drip, McKeen and Gardner try on a new round of jeans for year two of The Raw Denim Jeans Project, a $400 limited edition pair of Iron Hearts from Japan. The cycle begins again.