Distressed

you have been worn'd

It’s great the way they’re so blatant about it: "designed to tear with wear" – must be a new kind of fabric! Although it makes you laugh, there is an interesting trend in clothes, home decoration and furnishing for the lived-in, antiqued or distressed look. Distressed furniture’s been around a while. A friend of mine used to use ‘chains-and-stains’ to make new pine furniture look as though it had been around for years.

The old, beaten-up look was certainly OK for jeans when I started wearing them. OK, so you didn’t buy them bleached or torn, but you worked pretty hard to get them to look that way. Cool hunters soon learnt that we liked the look and sold it back to us. So the faux-antique, lived-in look’s been around for a while. Sadly it doesn’t stretch to the body as we are relentlessly urged to ‘Keep young and beautiful’.