How Are Blue Jeans Made & Dyed?
Most people own at least one pair of jeans. They are worn as much for fashion as for functionality. The word denim originates from serge de Nimes, a fabric that originated in the city of Nimes, France in the 1700s. Jeans were named after sailors from Genoa, known as Genes, who wore heavy duty, cotton work pants. In America, jeans were first worn by cotton plantation workers, who needed cheap and durable clothing. Today, jeans can be found in designer fashion collections throughout the world, with price tags of many hundreds of dollars. Does this Spark an idea?
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Yarn
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True denim fabric is manufactured with 100 percent cotton. Ginned cotton is fed through a carding machine, that cleans and untangles it, and gathers it into threads known as slivers. Spinning machines then twist and stretch the slivers into yarn.
Dyeing
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Most fabrics are dyed after they have been woven. Denim, however, is dyed once it has been formed into yarn. Ball warps are dipped into indigo dye multiple times, allowing the yarn to become thoroughly soaked with the dye. This multiple dipping, accounts for why jeans fade over time. The yarn is then coated with a starch sizing to strengthen it, in a process known as slashing. The indigo dye used in denim can be derived from the indigo plant or produced synthetically.
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Weaving
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Large mechanical looms then weave the thread into fabric. Denim's blue and white coloring comes from this weaving process, where blue threads form the vertical warp threads of the fabric and white threads form the horizontal weft threads. The blue threads are packed closer together than the white threads, and they cover three out of four white threads. This causes the blue color to be dominant.
Assembly
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High speed cutting machines will then cut huge stacks of denim into the component pattern parts required for the particular style being manufactured. Depending on the style, jeans are formed from, approximately, 15 individual pattern pieces. Assembly workers then sew them together, the final process being the attachment of any rivets and designer labels. On average, it will take 15 minutes and 12 separate steps to manufacture a pair of jeans.
Washing
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After assembly, some jeans are then pre-washed or stone-washed to alter their appearance. With pre-washed jeans, pumice is added to the laundering process to help the jeans to take on a faded and worn look. With stone-washed jeans, stones of varying sizes are added to the wash, as an abrasive, to give the jeans an uneven appearance.
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References
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- Photo Credit jeans image by Jan Will from Fotolia.com
