Men’s Style Guide | DIY Distressed Styles for Men: Part One

Walk along Queen Street, or any street in the city really, and you are bound to see tons of men and women wearing beat up jeans, shirts with holes in them, and other torn up pieces of clothing. It’s not as if these people don’t realize what they’re wearing, or don’t care, it is in fact quite the opposite. They are wearing their clothing this way intentionally! While distressed clothing – more specifically denim – is by no means a new trend, it has definitely grown in popularity over the last decade or so. Originally, jeans or shirts would end up this way through constant and intense wearing, but over time it became more and more apparent that there was something inherently appealing about this type of heavily worn in style. In fact, this look has become so popular that almost every store you walk in to now sells pre-distressed clothing of some sort (generally being pre-distressed en masse in the factory during production). This type of pre-fab distressing is now such a pillar of fashion that Kanye West has made it the focal point of his recent Yeezy Season clothing line. But there is no need to go and spend $2000 on a Yeezy piece when the exact same look can be achieved at home with the most basic of tools and just a little bit of time. In this post, I will detail the first of three different ways to distress some of your favourite items, with each being progressively more intricate and difficult. The other two techniques will be outlined next week!

Tools Required:

• A small cutting board
• A small serrated knife
• Tailor’s chalk (available at any fabric or craft store)
• Tweezers or nail file (optional)

DISCLAIMER:

As with anything, practice makes perfect and the first time you try one of these techniques it is very possible you will make a mistake or not get the result you intended. With this in mind, go to your nearest Value Village and pick up one or two pairs of jeans and a few t-shirts to practice on. This way you are much more likely to get the perfect distressed look when it comes to tearing your favourite pair of jeans instead of accidently ruining them. As well, be aware that these techniques only work properly with jeans that are 100% cotton – if your jeans are stretchy and contain even the tiniest bit of another material they will not distress properly.

The look shown above is one of the most commonly desired and also conveniently, one of the easiest to achieve. The first step is to put on your jeans, and with tailor’s chalk, mark down the outline of the areas that you want to be distressed. After you have marked the area you plan to distress, take off your jeans and slide your cutting board up the pant leg directly under the spot that you will be cutting. Now, go and make a series of horizontal cuts along the area you want distressed about one or two centimetres apart. Try to make these cuts as clean as possible as this will results in a more seamless distressed look while jagged or overlapping cuts will sever the ribbing of the pants (the white horizontal fabric that you are try to expose). After you are done cutting you should have what looks like a series of ribbons of denim going back and forth along your jeans.

Finally, to expose the ribbing of the jeans, there are two different techniques. The first and most simple way to achieve this is just to throw your pair of jeans through the wash and dry cycle a few times, which will remove the vertical pieces of fabric, leaving behind only the ribbing. If the idea of putting your favorite pair of jeans which fit perfectly into the dryer makes you nervous, don’t worry – there is another way. Take your pair of tweezers and use them to pull the vertical laying pieces of fabric away from the ribbing. While this is quite time consuming, it does allow for much more control when distressing jeans. Conversely, you can also use a nail file by rubbing it along the ribbons of denim which will also expose the ribbing. But be careful, if you rub too hard or aggressively, you might severe the ribbon.

This next look is very easy to achieve. To put large holes like this into your jeans follow all the same steps detailed above but once you have exposed the ribbing, go back over with a pair of scissors to cut away large chunks of the ribbing right where it meets the distressed denim, as you see fit. By doing this technique, you will get large distressed holes in your jeans that don’t look like you just cut them yourself (even though you did).

This final look is by far the easiest to achieve. After you have marked with your chalk the areas  you want your cuts go, and just make single slices with your knife instead of a series of slices. The more you wear and wash your jeans after making these cuts, the more they will fray and the better they will look. You can also run the edge of your blade along the cuts to accelerate the fraying process.

Do you wear distressed denim jeans? Have you distressed them yourself? Let us know in the comment section down below! If you haven’t, try following the instructions above and let us know how they turn out!

Designer Swap is Canada’s online luxury consignment shop and Toronto-based fashion blog. We sell authentic and pre-loved designer pieces and write about the newest fashion and beauty trends. Make sure to check us out on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest!

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