Why Are People Still Buying Ripped Jeans?

A reader wonders if ripped jeans will ever go out of style. Our fashion critic offers insight into the future of distressed denim.

Forget 10 years. Pre-ripped jeans, because that is what we are talking about, really — the kind of wear and tear that is artfully, or not so artfully, designed into denim, as opposed to the kind of wear and tear that happens over time — have been with us for more than three decades.

Their popularity has surged and waned, but ever since designers appropriated the signifiers of workwear, punk and hippie garb and offered them as fashion statements, these ripped-for-you jeans have never entirely gone away. They simply became known as “distressed denim.”

While you can argue the inauthenticity of buying your distress rather than creating it yourself, you can’t argue with designers’ ability to leverage the human desire for shortcuts, or fashion’s fundamental skill at absorbing the trappings of the underground and turning them into style.

“I don’t see ripped jeans going anywhere soon,” Benjamin Talley Smith said when I asked. Presumably he would know, since he is a denim specialist who has worked on the jeans lines of numerous brands, including Khaite, Walmart and Rag & Bone, and who haunts the flea markets of Los Angeles looking for old jeans with special lines of wear and tear for contemporary inspiration.

“If anything,” he said, “I feel the resurgence of more destroyed jeans in the premium and luxury market.”

As to why, it may have something to do with the current vogue for all things 1990s and 2000s, the original heyday of mass market distressed denim. It may also have something to do with the deterioration of dress codes in the post-lockdown world, the blurring of lines between work and play, and the way erstwhile weekend clothing can be dressed up just enough to go pretty much anywhere. Not to mention the discussion around sustainability and upcycling.