You’ll look at least 40% cooler if you’re rocking a pair of torn, distressed jeans. Sure, we might be making up that statistic on the spot, but it is true that distressed jeans are right in style at the moment; the more you can rip, tear, and fade those jeans, the more stylish they’re going to look.

Of course fashion brands know this and want to charge you more for the privilege of having rips in your jeans.

You can save yourself plenty of cash and create the edgy distressed look all by yourself with our easy step-by-step process.

Step 1: Fade the jeans

Jeans that look like they’re made of new material that have rips and holes in them don’t look quite right, so the first step is to fade the jeans, making them look old and worn.

This can be done in two ways:

1. Painting

Get a paintbrush and a mixture of 50% bleach, 50% water.

Apply the mixture to sections of the jeans that you would like to fade. Note that jeans don’t fade uniformly over their surface area, so if you want a believable faded look (you do), then get like Picasso and be creative in where you paint on the mix, focusing on areas such as the knees where jeans naturally tend to fade the most.

Leave the painted jeans overnight before washing and drying them. (Note: To avoid a disaster, don’t combine the jeans with your other washing.)

2. Sanding

Rub sandpaper across the jeans. This will soften the material right up, age them a few years and make them comfortable as all heck, like a pair of favourite worn in jeans. Jeans can handle a lot of sandpapering, so don’t stress about possibly creating holes.

Step 2: Put the jeans on and measure where you want to distress them

Use chalk to mark the exact spots on the jeans that you’d like to distress. Do this while wearing the jeans to ensure there are no unwelcome surprises if you rip into the wrong area and end up showing a lot more skin than intended.

Step 3: Cut some holes into the jeans

Use a utility knife (box cutter) to cut into the jeans in horizontal strips, a couple of centimetres apart. Make the strips as long across the material as you want the hole to be.

Step 4: Remove the blue threads from the newly cut strips

Jeans will have threads of two different colours; white threads (which run horizontally across the jeans) and blue (vertical).

By removing the blue threads only, what you’ll be left with is that horizontal white threaded look that is critical to a good pair of distressed jeans. Be sure to rip just a couple of the white threads too, this way your jeans won’t look too neat to be genuinely distressed.

Step 5: Take a razor to the edges

A cheap, disposable razor can do so much more to a pair of jeans than it can actually shaving something. Around the edges of pockets, the waistband, the zipper area or the cuffs, a razor is an invaluable tool for adding that finishing touch to the distressed look – simply “shave” the edges until they’ve got that scuffed up look.

Don’t pull out the cheese grater!

A popular alternative to the above five steps is to simply take to the jeans with a cheese grater and then grate away at the jeans. This is certainly a more efficient way of wearing the jeans down and putting holes in them, but we don’t recommend it.

See, the difference between distressed jeans as a fashion item and jeans that just need to be thrown away is that distressed jeans are carefully designed to look the way they do. That requires careful precision in the cuts you make and the threads you pull out of the jeans. A cheese grater, meanwhile, will create the distressed look very inconsistently across the jeans, and the end result is going to be a waste of a good pair of jeans.

A world of opportunity

You can easily apply similar techniques to basically anything that involves denim. While this process is more time consuming than just purchasing distressed jeans, not only will you save some cash but your jeans will be genuinely unique and you’ll be making your own personal fashion statement.

For plenty more tips like this, or more advice on altering clothing to suit your unique sense of style, be sure to browse the LookSmart styling hub. We’re the specialists in the repair, maintenance, and customisation of clothing.