Overcoming The Fear Of Washing Your A.P.C Jeans

Okay, so everybody knows that when you buy A.P.C jeans, they are stiff like the jeans your mother bought you when you were eleven years old. The kind of jeans that were like construction material, that you could sand a plank of wood with or use as a weapon to beat a burglar over the head with and so on. When you wore them, you walked around with stiff limbs for the first few weeks, with the denim inflexible and geeky and when you sat down, you'd take to a chair like a 90 year grandmother does, very slowly, with completely straight legs.

This is how A.P.C jeans are when you first buy them. Then, crucially, they start to give and you are suddenly in love with them. It's like they slowly adapt themselves to your body, having first spent a few months hanging out and observing you and seeing how you walk, sit and so on. And once they fit themselves to you, there is no other pair of jeans (or trousers for that matter), you'd rather be wearing.

The big thing and it's mythologised on the A.P.C cleaning instruction is that you can't wash your jeans for at least a year after buying them. Apparently it messes with the denim and the cut and the colour: so you wear them and wear them and wear them and do your best to avoid gurgling babies, splashing soy sauce and clumsy eating in general.

Eventually, around a year, you feel a serious need to freshen them up and start googling and seeing what others have done when their jeans can't go on any longer without being washed and find there are debates galore, about whether chucking them in the washing machine at 30 degrees, delicate cycle, is safe (many seemed to say it's fine), about whether they need to be dry cleaned, about whether as A.P.C suggest they should be washed in the ocean by their owners and then rubbed with sand, washed in the ocean some more and then washed in clean water and finally dried in the sun.

It's enough in the end to send you nuts, the worry of wrecking your beloved best ever pair of jeans, especially after enduring that chafing hellish eleven year old boy stiff jeans that your mother bought you season.

So yesterday, after 16 months of wearing my jeans, almost daily (!), I couldn't go another second without washing them: into the washing machine at 30 degrees on a delicate cycle they went and let me tell you, it was a nerve jittery Woody Allen of a fifty minutes.

But I needn't have worried, out they came, looking lovely and dark blue again and they dried in the London Spring sunshine on the window sill and this morning went on tight fitting again, the leg all straightened out (it had got a bit permamently bunched up around the ankle), as good as new.