From Rihanna to the Kardashians: distressed denim is clearly on-trend in 2018! This season is all about making your denim-inspired look your own, and what better way than with DIY?
Make your own distressed jeans and we promise you’ll look like a style queen. Need a hand to get your DIY distressed denim on-point? Check out this step-by-step guide by QUIZ — a top fashion retailer of women’s fashion including denim pieces and maxi dresses — to help!
Prepare your jeans for distressing
Although the whole point of this is to make your jeans look ‘worn’ and stylishly-messy, you don’t want to make any mistakes at the beginning. If you don’t stop to think what you’re doing before you start, you run the risk of ruining your jeans completely.
First step? Making sure your jeans are clean and dry! Put the jeans on and work out which areas you want to distress. Pockets, knees and the bum are popular parts to modify, as they are the areas of the jeans that naturally wear and tear. Use chalk to mark out where you want to distress.
Start shredding, tearing and ripping your denims!
Selected the areas you want to tear, rip and distress? To make sure the other side of your jeans remain safe as you cut, stuff a magazine or thick cardboard inside the jeans, positioning it under the area you’re going to work on. This will make sure you only cut one side of the jeans and not both!
Grab a safety knife and use it to carefully cut rips in various lengths — try to create a diamond shape when you do this. Once the cuts are done, the next step is to make them look frayed. Along the edge of each cut, gently tease the horizontal white threads using a safety pin, being careful not to break them. Then, using tweezers, pluck out the vertical threads to leave just the white horizontal threads. Do this for every cut.
Now is the time to distress…
Remember using sandpaper at school during woodwork lessons? Well, now’s the time to put these skills to use again. Take a piece of sandpaper and rub it across sections of your jeans. Doing so will create a natural-looking colour fade, perfect for adding the finishing touches to your distressed denim creation.
Get patching
Right now, your distressed jeans are done and looking fabulous — but how about personalising them to match your individual style? Bright floral patches are in vogue and practically leap off distressed denim to give you an eye-catching contrast of grunge and chic. If you want a subtle embellishment, why not go with lace? This is a classic feminine fabric that will dress up your modern distressed denim with retro charm for the ideal smart-casual look.
Everyone will be asking where you bought your cool, in vogue distressed jeans from when you step out in your DIY denims. Sounds like hard work? Shop QUIZ’s collection of jeans to find ready-made distressed denim with none of the effort but all of the style…
