Would you wear the same pair of jeans without washing them for 3 months?
That’s exactly what Melbourne researcher Tullia Jack recruited 30 volunteers to do. She got them to wear the same pair of jeans five days a week for three months straight without washing them, an experiment for her thesis that aimed to challenge our culture of “extreme clean”.
From news.com.au:
Despite stains and spills ranging from tuna and avocado to motor oil and chocolate, Ms Jack says the expectation dirty denim will be whiffy is much worse than the reality.
“Not washing your jeans isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds,” the Melbourne University student and RMIT fashion lecturer says.
“You really don’t need to wash clothes as often as you think. Stains come and go, they just wear off.”
Burying her nose in the pile of well-worn jeans on her desk, she picks out perfumes ranging from eggshells to caramel.
“The jeans don’t smell socially challenging. They just smell like people,” she says.
Maybe we are unwittingly taking place in our very own version of this experiment because according to a recent survey, 75% of women only wear a quarter of the jeans they own. With the average woman owning 10 pairs of jeans, that means that most of us are rotating the same three pairs of jeans.
I know I stick to two pairs of jeans – one skinny pair that I can dress up or down, and one super comfy casual pair. I also have a whole lot that just aren’t quite right. Too tight, too high-waisted, too flared, too thin, too black, too pin-striped. I’m like the Goldilocks of jeans.
My favourite jeans get washed when they stretch out of shape or when they get any kind of stain on them – considering I’m a messy eater, this is every couple of weeks – but I do hate that feeling of trying to get back into a pair of freshly washed jeans.
How many pairs of jeans do you own? How many do you actually wear? And how often do you wash them?
