Stone Washing

Pounded Soft in a Drum of Stones

Stone washing achieves by abrasion what years of wear would do slowly. The process uses large stones to roughen up the fabric being processed. Garments are placed in a large horizontal industrial clothes washer that is also filled with large rocks. As the wash cylinder rotates, the cloth fibers are repeatedly pounded and beaten as the tumbling stones ride up the paddles inside the drum and fall back down onto the fabric. Every fall is a small impact and a small scrape, and multiplied by hundreds of stones and many minutes of rotation, the impacts add up to a fabric whose surface has been evenly distressed: color lifts where the stones strike hardest, stiff fibers loosen, and a brand-new garment comes out looking and feeling lived in. Stone washing is similar in operation to a ball mill, except that this is a wet process - water carries the garments and stones together and washes away the fiber and dye the abrasion releases.

The second effect is as valuable as the first. Stone-washing helps to increase the softness and flexibility of otherwise stiff and rigid fabrics such as canvas and denim. New denim in particular can be board-like: heavily sized, tightly woven and dyed a deep, uniform indigo that few wearers want to break in from zero. Tumbling with stones breaks down that initial rigidity throughout the whole garment at once, so trousers bend at the knee, jackets fold at the elbow, and canvas softens in the hand before the garment is ever worn. The mill, in effect, pre-wears the cloth under controlled conditions, trading a measured amount of surface fiber and dye for immediate comfort and a faded character that would otherwise take months of use to develop.

Stonewashed Jeans and the 1980s

The process found its defining product in denim. Stonewashed jeans are jeans that have been treated to produce a faded, worn appearance, usually accomplished either by washing the jeans with pumice in a rotating drum, or also by using chemicals to create the appearance without the use of a rotating drum. Pumice suits the work well: it is light enough to tumble freely, hard and porous enough to abrade denim's surface, and it attacks the raised parts of the weave first, so fading concentrates naturally where real wear would concentrate it. Stonewashed jeans were a popular fashion trend in the 1980s, when a pale, broken-in finish signaled ease and informality against the dark, crisp denim that preceded it.

For the apparel trade, stone washing is best understood as a finishing decision with costs and benefits to balance. Abrasion that creates softness also removes material, so time, stone load and garment weight must be controlled garment by garment: under-processed cloth stays stiff and dark, over-processed cloth fades unevenly and weakens at seams and stress points. When the balance is right, the washer delivers in under an hour the two qualities buyers ask stone washing for - a worn-out appearance that reads as authentic rather than damaged, and a softness and flexibility that make stiff fabrics such as denim and canvas comfortable from the first wearing.