Young Brunette Girl Outside In Jeans

In the 1970s Hal Burgess first marketed "pre-washed" jeans. He was a salesman for his father, who owned a large jean manufacturing company in Cartersville, Georgia. While on a sales trip, there was a flood in the hotel room where Burgess was storing jeans. He asked the hotel owner if he could rent out the pool to wash the flooded jeans. The jeans shrunk but Hal decided to market them as 'pre-washed' jeans and sold them two sizes smaller than they were initially labeled. This was the first time 'pre-shrunk' jeans were marketed.
Used look created by sandblasting
Many consumers in Western societies are willing to pay extra for jeans that have the appearance of being used. To give the fabrics the right worn look sandblasting is used. Sandblasting has the risk of causing silicosis to the workers, and in Turkey, more than 5,000 workers in the textile industry have been stricken with this disease, and 46 people are known to have died. Sweden's Fair Trade Center conducted a survey among 17 textile companies that showed very few were aware of the dangers caused by sandblasting jeans manually. Several companies said they would abolish this technique from their own production.