Steve Dubbeldam and Steve Opperman, owners of Iron Army Clothing, recently realized they hadn’t been in the denim business long enough to see a pair of their jeans be thoroughly worn out.
That will change next June with the conclusion of 777, a “lifestyle art project” they launched, naturally, on Nov. 7.
Iron Army, based in Los Angeles, is using its Web site, ironarmyclothing.com, to track seven pairs of raw jeans worn every day for seven months by seven individuals living in different parts of the world. Although the idea of having a person wear jeans for long periods isn’t necessarily new, following the evolution, or degeneration, of raw denim appealed to Opperman and Dubbeldam as a way to make the site more interactive.
“Raw denim makes up a lot of our business,” said Dubbeldam, who launched the label with Opperman in December 2004. “We had been thinking about the fact that we hadn’t been around long enough to see a pair of our jeans really worn out. We wanted to discover and expose all the steps in between.”
They enlisted seven men to wear Iron Army’s raw Hiro jeans, which sell for $90 wholesale. The only ground rules were that they had to wear the same pair every day for seven months, they had to tell people about the project and they had to be committed to providing “quality content” for the Iron Army Web site. Dubbeldam acknowledged that most of the participants are friends. However, Dubbeldam and Opperman recognized the importance of choosing people who live in different places and don’t spend most of their days working in an office cubicle.
“We wanted to choose people that had interesting lifestyles so that they will be interesting to follow,” Dubbeldam said. “Some are artists, some are musicians, one is a construction worker….It gives the project a lot of life.”
Some of the participants are embracing the project with particular gusto. Landon Schedler, a construction worker in Edmonton, Alberta, has been sleeping in his jeans, Dubbeldam said. Schedler’s first update for the Web site showed that it didn’t take long to give the jeans his own mark of authenticity.
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“Workweek comes along and I’m grinding away at my construction job when the grinder slips and slices right through my jeans and into my thigh,” Schedler wrote. “No real bleeding, but left my denims with a nice little gash. Maybe just a preview of what these great jeans have in store for them.”
The participants’ blogs, videos and pictures are geared to building a community around the brand, something that Dubbeldam believes will be more effective than advertising.
“We’re designing and thinking for our demographic, about what’s going to get me excited,” Dubbeldam said. “When people go to our Web site, they’re not talking about our jeans afterward, they’re talking about our brand.”
The conclusion of 777 will go one of two ways. Dubbeldam’s ideal finish is to have all seven participants come to Los Angeles, which would require one to fly in from Switzerland, to attend a party to give the jeans their first wash. If that proves financially prohibitive, Dubbeldam said they will try to have each participant host a party in his hometown, taking pictures and videos to upload onto the site.