Are those really jeans? Look again

UNITED STATES – Swedish fashion house Acne Studios makes US$800 (S$1,060) jeans that look like something a roofer would wear to a rave.

They are coated in paint flecks, battered as a baseball mitt and burdened with enough metal trinkets that they should weigh almost 10kg.

Except they do not. They are not covered in paint either. And those wear marks? They are all a facade. Each splatter, splice and wear stain on the jeans is printed. The chains and charms are a one-dimensional illusion.

In the age of artificial intelligence fakery, designers are getting in on the fake news and making jeans that are not quite real.

 A long flirtation with trompe l’oeil

Fashion history is a speckled battlefield of “trompe l’oeil” (French for “trick the eye”) technique to make consumers marvel and gasp. As far back as 1927, French couturier Elsa Schiaparelli was minting cheeky sweaters with flat, sham bows knit in them.

The 1990s witnessed a wave of postmodern, illusionist garments – British designer Katharine Hamnett’s jumpsuit that duped for a zoot suit, Jean Paul Gaultier’s dresses printed with images of women in bikinis and Martin Margiela’s whole collection of matt “sweaters” and “coats” printed, deviously, with photos of other garments.

These designs were often conspicuous in their fakery – inviting onlookers to be in on the gag.

Take Gaultier’s trompe l’oeil jeans from 1997. The “denim” is printed smaller than the actual pants, exposing white beneath.

Today’s fake jeans are intended to deceive absolutely. They are also proving quite popular: Acne Studios’ version is sold out on its website.

The summer’s bratty style icons, English singer-songwriter Charli XCX and Australian singer-songwriter Troye Sivan, have worn other photo-realistic Acne designs, including a pair screened to look as if they have some leather chaps dangling off the front.

Other surrealist styles, like Balenciaga’s US$1,490 fleece “jeans” with synthetic rips and tatters and Swedish label Our Legacy’s artificially abused jeans, are sold out in several sizes on these brands’ respective websites.

Colin Huang, 25, a stylist and designer in Los Angeles who recently purchased Acne’s printed jeans, said: “When I saw the jeans, my first thought was it actually is like dirty denim.”

They have become his wearable, made-you-look party trick. From about a metre away, he said, “you wouldn’t know if these pants were printed or not”.

High resolution, maximum illusion

In one sense, this audacious accuracy is a testament to just how scarily exact clothing production techniques have become.

You can easily scan a pair of jeans and print them onto a pair of pants so it looks sort of seamless, said Trevor Gorji, designer of Fugazi, a nascent streetwear brand that has dabbled in trompe l’oeil pants.

No brand has cornered the denim duping market like Rag & Bone. In 2013, the mainstream brand introduced the Miramar, a series of terry cloth and fleece sweatpants printed to look like jeans.

The label now offers more than a dozen ersatz options, ranging from elephantine baggies to slender joggers. It added men’s options in 2024. Each pair, said Jennie McCormick, chief merchandising and design officer, is built off an existing pair of actual Rag & Bone denim that is photographed and screened onto the cotton pants.

The result is the pants equivalent of taping eyeballs over your glasses while you are sleeping at your desk. “It’s that novelty that draws people in,” Ms McCormick said. “And then it is the comfort that perhaps keeps people coming back.”

But designer variations – those that cost and do not really offer greater comfort than a pair of jeans – appeal more as a high-minded fashion statement.

“It’s this idea of fashion being a picture,” said Acne’s founder and creative director Jonny Johansson.

What he meant was that, today, people engage with clothes primarily through their phones – they scan Instagram shots of runway shows and shop through apps without seeing the product in person first.

Why, these deceitful jeans seem to ask, should rips and chains and paint flecks be three-dimensional if they are primarily going to be seen in a single dimension?

You could even go all William Gibson and see these jeans as a knowing commentary on how people cannot trust anything these days. Just like the digitally generated clip of a little girl riding an alligator during Hurricane Milton, jeans are not what they seem any more.

“It’s very contemporary,” Johansson said with his dry Swedish wit.

The cool illusion

But surely not everyone is thinking this deeply about their jeans. Most trompe l’oeil trouser owners presented a plainer theory: They just look cool.

“To this day, they’re the most interesting pair of pants that I have,” said Mr Bryson Moore, 30, a content creator in Toronto, Canada, who purchased Our Legacy’s Digital Print jeans in 2023.

Up close, he said, you can really take in the spurious rips and bleach flecks. “When you have the jeans in your hand, you can really sit there and look at them and you’re like, ‘Wow, there’s been a lot of attention to detail,’” he said.

Huang saw the dubious denim as a riff on people buying battered Dickies and Carhartts on eBay and Depop. They are workwear, minus the work, plus a whole lot of extra money. He said: “You’re essentially getting that look without feeling the dirt.” NYTIMES