Many wear jeans one, two or three times before putting them in the laundry. Enough to horrify Charles Bergh, CEO of Levi’s. The boss has repeatedly revealed in interviews that he almost never washes his denim pants. At a conference in 2014, he said he was wearing jeans he bought a year before and had never washed before. “And I still don’t have any skin disease,” he said.
In 2023, he went even further, declaring on the CNBC news channel: “I never put my jeans in the washing machine.” Apart from the fact that this damages the textile, he considers that the denim industry already consumes large quantities of water for the production and processing of cotton.
“I’m not saying that you should never wash your jeans,” explains Charles Bergh, who favors other ways of washing them. “If I have, for example, a little curry on my pants, I just clean the spot where the stain is,” he explains. His method is interesting to say the least. “If it’s really dirty, in this case because I’ve been sweating a lot, I wash it in the shower,” he says. He puts on the pants and soaps his legs. A technique he says he acquired when he frequented youth hostels and did not have access to a washing machine.
On the Levi’s website, the manufacturer also recommends only washing jeans after wearing them a dozen times. Models made from raw denim, that is to say unwashed and untreated, should only be put in the washing machine three times a year. Jeans should be turned inside out to be washed in cold water, and air dried.
