The history, business of new distressed jeans
The trend that has reinvigorated the jeans business ($10.5 billion in size but a whopping 89% of jeans sold are at the sub-$50 price point) is that of replica vintage jeans (made to look worn or distressed and priced in the $100s, even $1000s) that started in the early 1990s with the Japanese beginning to seek out used older jeans according to this New York Times story (registration required):
The ''discovery'' of jeans as antiques required a society that could aestheticize the ordinary. ''The Japanese see everything,'' says Rogan Gregory, a TriBeCa-based clothing designer who sells a line of signature distressed denim pants and work wear domestically and to Europe and Japan. ''If I send my Japanese distributors something that is a shade off what they saw before -- even if it's better -- they're like, 'This is different; we don't want it,''' he says. ''It's a pain, but it's beautiful.'' Even appreciating flaws of vintage clothing is part of the Zen tradition of wabi/sabi -- the idea that the value of an object comes from its imperfections. It's as if jeans are the answer to a society steeped in simulacra. ''There's so much plastic in Japan,'' Gregory says. ''People were starving for the real thing.''