Denim is more than just a cotton fabric; it inspires strong opinions within the hearts of historians, designers, teenagers, movie stars, reporters, and writers. Interest bordering on passion can be found among textile and costume historians today, especially in the debate over the true origins of denim. These experts have put decades of work into their research; here is a summary of the prevailing opinions about the birth of denim, followed by a discussion of the way Levi Strauss & Co has helped to contribute to denim's movement around the world. Approximately five billion pairs of jeans are produced worldwide each year. Jeans have been a popular item of clothing for several decades with a long manufacturing history. Jeans were first used by dock workers in Genoa several centuries ago as they valued the material for its durability. In this paper, we discussed the Denim dry finishing and its importance.

Garment finishing is one of the finishing methods applied to garments, and the use of new technologies and equipment enables us to obtain the desired results. For finishing denim fabrics, a range of treatment methods is used. They all are aimed at new possible effects of fabric appearance, namely mill wash or rinse wash, stonewash, moon wash, sand wash, bleach, over dyed-look, damaged-look, scrubbed-look, sandblast, PP spray, Whisker effects, 3D effects, and etc. Particularly, the dry finishing creates many effects on denim fabric; it will stimulate the customers to buy, and also it increases the market potential of the denim market.

Dry Finishing

The distressed jeans that we see around everywhere undergo a wide variety of wet as well as dry treatments to get the desired effects. Destroying denims is as much an art as it is a technique. The direction in fashion is varied across all areas, particularly in denim dry finishing, whether worn or torn to wrinkled or pressed; these trends can appeal to a wide range of consumers. These can be achieved by a variety of denim dry processing techniques, which are mainly dependent on physical and on chemical abrasion of the surface dye, thereby producing different wash-down looks to the denim fabrics.

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Aravin Prince Periyasamy is Asst Professor, Dept. of Textile Chemistry, Govardhana Rao Chilukoti is from D.K.T.E. Society's Textile Engineering College, Ichalkaranji and K. Thavasiappan is Production Executive, Wonder blue Denim Washing, Bangaluru

Originally published in Textile Review, November 2011