How to Make Jeans Look Vintage

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mitra Chester, and I'm at Deluxe Resale Boutique, in Eugene, Oregon, and I'm going to show you how to achieve some vintage effects on your new jeans. This is a pair of vintage jeans and as you can see, they have some fading and wear around the edges of the seams. They have some whiskers, they have some snags, a little wear marks, some fading, some fraying going on, patches maybe. So, to apply these effects to a new pair of jeans, you'll need some tools like, some chalk, some scissors, maybe a bleach pen, some excess patch denim material, an exacto knife, or you can also use a pocket knife, or razor blade. And, I'm going to show you on this pair here, how to achieve some of these effects. These are some factory done examples of how they've been applied to some new, some new jeans. So, the first thing we're going to do is some whiskers. What you want to do is try the jeans on, and with some chalk, buckle your leg, and mark where the whiskers naturally occur on your body. For all of these effects, you want to mark the placement with chalk, when the jeans are on you, so that the placement lines up and doesn't look awkward, or fake. So, once you've done that, you take the jeans off and for the whiskers what you're going to do, is basically go over the chalk marks with a bleach pen, which needs to be activated with some warm water. So, you can either spray them with some warm water ahead of time, or just throw them right in the washing machine. But, you're tracing over the chalk lines with your bleach pen. You can also achieve a crease line with bleach pen by ironing a crease, equal distant from the side seams, down the front and along that line, applying a bead of the bleach pen on the ironed crease line. The next effect we're going to talk about is some of the wear along the edges, that can be done with an exacto knife and basically what you're going to do, is take the edge you want and scrape the knife along it, to achieve kind of a fading, and a roughed up look. You can do it on this along the waist or even along the bottom, but it's going to kind of lighten them up, and give you kind of the frayed look. Every single one of these techniques need to be washed and dried in a hot dryer afterwards, in order for them to, to experience their full kind of like fraying or whatever, washing out of dyes that needs to be accomplished. O.k, for patching, you want to basically cut a piece of patched denim, in the shape that you want. And, whether you're doing it on an actual hole or not, if you're patching a hole, like this, underneath, you can put it over and use various techniques of stitching across it, or around it, or under and do the same with a sewing machine, or by hand. To create a hole, which is going to look like this after it's washed and dried, you basically draw your hole and cut within the perimeter of the hole, the hole, and then once it's washed and dried, it will kind of fray out to the line that you've originally intended. For a slash or a rip, you basically start with a small incision in the denim, and you can either rip it, or cut it in the direction you want. Again, you want to stick with a little bit smaller than you're initially wanting, or finally wanting because it will fray out a little bit. For larger patterns of fading or wear, you can accomplish that using sand paper. Some people use a pumice stone, but basically you scrape it across within the perimeter of the area that you want to fade. This is a one eighty grit sand paper. You can use rougher, to maybe snag and certain fabrics that contain spandex will probably snag more than others. But, you can see it's getting kind of a wear mark look, and once it's washed and dried, it can come out basically like that, exposing a little bit of texture in the denim. So, those are how you can achieve some vintage techniques on your new jeans. Keep in mind whenever you're distressing jeans, the distress is actually real and it will weaken the jeans when you're wearing them. So, holes even though they may be created under false circumstances, they're actually holes and they probably will act like holes once you wear them so they'll spread and tear more. So, if that's what you're going for, that's great. But, keep in mind that you, if you want a little bit of wear out of your jeans, you don't want to go hog wild with this. But, good luck!"