Avre Friday Briefing #71
How denim ages
A couple of customers have been in touch recently asking about how to look after their Batch No. 3 denim shirts. Our short answer is pretty much: don't!
Indigo is the dye that makes the denim blue and it's applied before the fabric even exists: the warp yarns — the ones running lengthways — are dipped in indigo repeatedly, building up the colour in layers with each pass, while the weft yarns are left undyed. That's why your shirt is blue on the outside and pale on the inside.
It also explains the fading. Indigo doesn't penetrate the cotton fibre — it sits on the surface of the yarn in those layers. Every time the fabric creases, rubs or flexes, a little indigo wears away and the white core of the yarn starts to show through. It happens fastest wherever the shirt works hardest: elbows, cuffs, the collar fold, the edges of the placket. Which means the fading maps directly onto how you wear it. Roll your sleeves and you'll get a crease line where the roll sits as the dye fades. Carry a bag on one shoulder and that side will fade first.
This is why no two shirts end up the same. Ours starts life pre-washed — soft and broken-in from day one — but the indigo keeps developing from there, and after a couple of years of wear, your shirt will mirror the way you wear it.
As for care, less is more:
Wash only when it actually needs it — spot-clean and air out in between. When you do wash, turn it inside out, use cold water with similar colours, and skip the tumble dryer; hang it to dry instead. Every wash takes a little indigo with it, so the less often you wash, the higher the contrast in the fade.
But there's no wrong way to do it. Wash it weekly and you'll get an even, faded blue all over. Barely wash it and you'll get sharp, high-contrast creases. Both look great — it's just your call which story the shirt ends up telling.
On this day — 24th July 1944
A Water Buffalo, loaded with Marines, churns through the sea bound for beaches of Tinian Island near Guam
While we're on the subject of Batch No. 3, on the morning 24th July 1944, US Marines landed on Tinian in the Mariana Islands — the operation Admiral Raymond Spruance later called "probably the most brilliantly conceived and executed amphibious operation in World War II."
The Japanese expected the landing at Tinian Town in the south, where the good beaches were, and had fortified accordingly. So the US Navy gave them exactly what they were looking for: battleships and destroyers pounded Tinian Town while transports lowered landing craft offshore and Marines of the 2nd Division climbed down the cargo nets in full view. It was a feint. The real assault went in on two tiny beaches in the north-west — so narrow that doctrine said a landing there was impossible — where Navy frogmen had scouted the approaches and the 4th Marine Division came ashore against light opposition. By nightfall, over 15,000 Marines were on the island.
Nine days of hard fighting followed against a garrison of some 9,000 Japanese troops, most of whom fought to the death, before the island was declared secure on 1st August. Tinian's flat terrain then became one of the war's most important pieces of real estate: its airfields grew into the largest bomber base in the world, and it was from Tinian, just over a year later, that the Enola Gay took off for Hiroshima.