How to wash your Loomstate jeans form the article, Only fashion could make me bathe with jeans on by LEAH McLAREN of the theglobeandmail.com.

…and when I tried them on at home I was pleased to note that they fit. The only glitch was the washing instructions. I found them printed on an unbleached paper card tied to one of the belt loops by a piece of twine. “We think it’s best to wash these with a little shampoo while wearing them in the shower or bathtub. You’ll notice the indigo will bleed so don’t spend all day in there. While they are wet, bend your knees to stretch them out, but don’t strain yourself. When done, simply hang to dry in the sun.”

Pardon?

The next day, I phoned up the Loomstate offices in New York and spoke to Scott Hahn, one of the company’s founding partners.

“Dude,” I said, “what’s with the washing instructions?”

“You don’t want them to dry with the wrong wrinkles,” he explained. “You want them to dry in your leg form. Avoiding detergent and dryers tightens the fibres, so you get a closed fibre, with an intensely personalized sculptural fading instead of the uniformed fading and a bloomed yarn, which creates a hairy, fuzzy aesthetic. That’s something serious denim people want to avoid.”

Loomstate (shop), I learned, uses only organic, pesticide-free cotton to make what they describe as “responsible clothes” for people who are “committed to treading lightly on the earth.” On its website (http://www.loomstate.org), you can watch an interview with an organic dairy farmer talking about how much his cows like eating the organic cottonseed byproduct that is produced in the making of Loomstate jeans. What this has to do with washing your jeans while wearing them in the shower is anybody’s guess, but it seemed credible enough to convince me that the washing instructions are no joke: Loomstate is a post-ironic brand.

You can read the full article at www.theglobeandmail.com