How Wide the Hem Should Be

Brands publish a leg opening here and there, but the figures have never been put side by side, so I counted. Every pair of Levi's listed at Zappos, which publishes waist, rise, inseam and leg opening on each product page: a hundred and one styles in the listing, sixty-two of which give a leg opening at all.

The numbers do not share a scale. A women's 501 is listed at seven inches across the hem, the men's cut of the same jean at fourteen, a women's bootcut at twenty. Seven inches laid flat and fourteen inches around are the same trouser measured two ways. Neither listing says which. The figures sit in a collapsed panel under the fabric composition, sometimes with a note on which size they were taken from, sometimes without one. Three of the sixty-two come in under nine inches, all of them women's jeans at a 26-inch waist, and all three have to be flat measurements, because a seven-inch circumference will not go over a human foot. Those three I doubled, to 12, 14 and 16, which puts them inside the rest of the sample. Untouched they would sit narrower than every skinny in it. The other fifty-nine I left exactly as published.

That argument only reaches those three. From ten inches up both readings stay possible, since twelve could be a flat measurement on a wide leg or a circumference on a skinny one. The fit name carries nothing either: the seventeen pairs labelled straight run from ten inches to eighteen.

A band still shows through the mess. Twenty-five of the sixty-two sit between fifteen and eighteen inches, with skinny and tapered cuts down at eleven to fourteen and bootcut, flare and baggy up at nineteen to twenty-four. Levi's itself publishes sixteen inches for the 501 Original at a size 32 and sixteen and a half for the 501 '90s women's cut, while the retailer measured that same jean at fourteen. The first figure comes off a pattern block and the second off a tape laid on a single sample, so neither of them describes the trousers on your legs. Lay a pair flat, run a tape across the bottom of one leg, double it.

Then the boot. A Dr. Martens 1460 stands six inches at the shaft on an inch and a quarter of heel, and retail listings put the opening at the top of that shaft at ten to thirteen inches around depending on the size, a figure the brand does not publish itself. Compare that with your hem, since both are circumferences. Sixteen inches clears a thirteen-inch shaft by three, so the denim drops past it and gathers on the laces. The six inches of shaft is the run over which that gathering happens. Fourteen inches clears the same shaft by one, which is not enough to fall, so it catches at the top and rides up to show ankle. A canvas shoe has nothing to catch on, so any of these hems lands on the shoe itself.

My favourite pair is a set of 501s I've had about four winters. Sixteen inches round the hem. They drop onto the laces and sit there when I'm standing still. Once I start walking, the denim's soft enough by now that the hem climbs the boot and stops at the top eyelet.

The boot is what fixes your hem in place. The 1460 is Goodyear welted, the upper stitched to the sole and heat-sealed at 700 degrees. A welted sole comes off and goes back on without touching the upper. A welted pair runs $180 new, or near $128 on sale. Resole it and the hem keeps landing in the same place.

What Size the Plaid Wants to Be

The trouser is now fixed at both ends. Working up the body, the next number that decides anything is the chest, and the Gildan 5000 publishes its grade for the heavy cotton blank most printed band tees run on:

S

chest 34-36 in · body 28 in

M

chest 38-40 in · body 29 in

L

chest 42-44 in · body 30 in

XL

chest 46-48 in · body 31 in

2XL

chest 50-52 in · body 32 in

One step on that chart gets you four inches of chest and an inch of body, and that is a knitted tee blank. Woven shirts are graded by whoever cuts them and the steps are not the same, so the chart tells you what a size step means on your tee and nothing about the plaid shirt. For the shirt, measure it: you want roughly four inches more across the chest than the tee, which is enough to hang the front edges clear of your ribs so it falls open.

Work off the tape. The letter on the tag is disputed. Wan-Ju Iris Franz went through the size charts of fifty-four American apparel brands for a paper called Economics of Vanity Sizing, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization in 2017, and found systematic size inflation in womenswear and next to none in menswear, where sizing stays pinned to chest and waist measurements. Vintage dealers who handle these garments daily argue the reverse, and put a 1960s medium at a 38-inch chest against 41 to 43 inches for a modern one. Franz was measuring size charts. The dealers are measuring garments. In a shop with a forty-year-old cardigan in your hands, theirs is the number that applies.

How Many Layers to Wear

Collar, cuff, hem. The plaid shirt gives you the hem, since worn open it hangs below the tee. The other two come from the thin long sleeve under the short-sleeved tee: buy it so the cuff comes past the tee sleeve as far as the base of your thumb, and in a colour that differs from the tee at the neck. Marie Claire found that arrangement on the street in New York this spring, a shrunken T-shirt over a thin white long sleeve with the cuffs showing. Stop at three. A fourth edge at the waist draws a horizontal line at your hip. Tuck it in.

One garment can do two of the three on its own. This layered-hem hoodie at $91 is cut as a short fleece over a longer one, with both hems and both cuffs left raw, so the darker under-layer shows at the wrist and again below the pocket. Cotton fleece, no slogan, no hardware. Two edges from one garment at $91, against roughly $60 for a tee and a separate long-sleeve.

Layered-Hem Fleece Hoodie$91Two hoodies sewn into one. A short layer of cotton fleece over a longer one, every hem left raw, every cuff left raw. Put it on: the darker layer shows at both wrists, then again a few inches under the pocket. Two of your three edges out of one garment. Add a collar, you have all three. Grey, S to XL. The layering is built in, so the wrist reads the same way every morning with one decision already made for you. Buy it for that.

Building the Outfit From the Numbers Above

A graphic tee at the hip bone. A thin long-sleeve beneath it, cuffs out at the wrist. A check shirt one step up in size over the top, open, hanging past the tee. Denim at the width settled above, dropped onto the laces. Nothing else patterned.

That is collar, cuff and hem, top to bottom, every position fixed by a tape measure. Four garments, about $83 of them new, and not one hour of wear on any of it.

Cobain's Striped Shirt and Gold Chain, 1993

That combination went to an awards show in 1993 with one aged piece in it. Work up from the floor, except that the photographs cut off before the shoes, so start at the trousers. They are the washed blue 501s with the patches on them, the same pair as the Heart-Shaped Box video, and in 2023 they sold for $412,750. Above them, a close-cut long-sleeved shirt in a black and white stripe fine enough to blur at a distance, which lets one plain shirt do the work of a printed one. Hooked to a belt loop between the two, a gold wallet chain. Nothing on the head, nothing at the neck.

That striped shirt was not bought for the evening. In the Heart-Shaped Box video the same black and white stripe sits under a metallic silver shirt, over the same patched jeans. Four garments in rotation, two of them turning up again on an awards stage.

The 10th MTV Video Music Awards, Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, 2 September 1993. The rest of that room had dressed for the occasion. Two of the three things he had on were available at a counter that afternoon.

Breaking In Flannel

The third thing took years, and a flannel shirt starts the same way. New, it is the wrong garment until the nap lies down. Flannel gets brushed at the mill, on one face or both, which drags fibre ends up out of the yarn until they stand on end; that fuzz is the nap. A shop-fresh one holds its shape when you open it and bows away from your chest at the front edges. Wash it until those edges hang straight down instead. You can check where a shirt sits on that journey with your fingers: rub the cloth between finger and thumb, and if you can feel the nap it will fall open and stay open, while flat crisp cotton will hold a crease and sit closer to you. The first month also settles where you put the plaid. Worn open, it puts two vertical edges either side of the printed tee and turns one flat torso into three planes. Buttoned, it reads as an ordinary check shirt and the tee disappears. Tied at the waist, it cuts a horizontal across the hip and takes visible length off the torso. Tie it at the narrowest point of your waist, not down on the hip bone. Pull both tails tight, thread one through the opposite belt loop, then knot.

That advice applies to cotton flannel and not to wool. Pendleton wants its wool shirts washed cold on a gentle cycle and line dried, which is not a softness instruction at all: warm water and a dryer will felt wool and shrink it, so following Pendleton is what stops the shirt shrinking, at the price of it staying stiff. Wool flannel therefore never arrives at the drape described above. If you want that drape, buy the shirt in cotton, or buy the wool one second-hand, with the years already in it.

Cobain's Unplugged Cardigan, 1993

Sony Studios, New York, 18 November 1993. Olive going to sage, acrylic and mohair and Lycra, made by Manhattan Industries some time in the 1960s and bought second-hand. Five buttons, one of them gone. Both patch pockets discoloured. A cigarette burn beside the left one. Unwashed since he last wore it. Julien's itemised all of that, and CNBC reported what the tag inside says, which is medium. Underneath it, CNN gives a white tee and stops there, while i-D gives a patterned button-up with a white band tee under it. Take i-D's version. It names a garment CNN does not mention. A description that adds a specific item is usually working from the footage rather than from memory. Enthusiast forums count four layers, but that has never been published anywhere. Below that, loose blue denim with the hem down over flat canvas shoes worn through at the toe. At the wrist a watch, on the hands two rings, and round the neck the lanyard holding his own pass to the taping. Nothing on the head.

Every line of that is a record of wear. The burn is a lit cigarette held at hip height, the discolouration is hands going in and out, the button came off and stayed off. Rolling Stone reports he had been wearing the thing for months before the taping, and took it on tour afterwards.

The tag still says medium. It sold in 2019 for $334,000.

How Denim Fades

Indigo never soaks into cotton. It clings to the outside of the yarn in a brittle bond and leaves the core white, as Heddels explains at length. That white core is what comes through when the blue rubs off. Rub the surface and the blue chips off it, so the colour goes only where you rub. A hip and a knee bend in the same spot on every body, so the marks land in the same places. The trade has names for all of them. Sit down enough times and the fabric folds at the hip in the same line over and over; those pale rays across the front of the thigh are whiskers. Behind the knee the same thing happens from bending, in a lattice. That one is a honeycomb. The rectangle on your back pocket is a wallet. Stacks form at the hem where it rests on your shoes. Only the raised edge of a crease loses colour, so the dark line beside it is what makes the pale one visible. So nothing shows for months, until the same fold has opened and closed in the same spot often enough.

You wear the jeans, wash them when they smell, wear them again, and none of it shows while it is happening. Then you look down in decent light. The fronts of your thighs have gone pale in a shape you did not put there, the seams sit lighter than the panels either side of them, and the trousers look like something you own. That is the thing people are trying to buy when they buy pre-distressed.

Factories make the same marks a different way. A whisker-faded pair on the shelf here shows the process plainly: the lines fan across the front of both thighs at the same angle, in the same places, high up. Buying that is buying the first year up front, which is a fair trade if you want the look now. What matters underneath is the cloth, and rigid cotton keeps fading long after the printed part has stopped meaning anything. Going by one trade account of the process, the lines go on by hand with emery paper over a rubber pattern board, or a carbon dioxide laser burns them in, and resin cured at 140 to 160 degrees for 40 to 60 minutes locks them there before the jean is ever washed. It goes onto the front thigh of both legs before any body has folded the cloth, so the two legs match. The branding survives, since the label is the part being sold.

Whisker-Faded Washed Jeans$89100 percent cotton, medium weight, double-needle stitching where it takes strain. Rigid denim holds a crease long enough for the colour to lift along it, which is how a pair grows its own marks over the years. Whiskers come printed across both thighs, which buys you the first year if you want the look now. Wash them hot. Wear them hard. Your own creases land over the top eventually. S to 2XL.

Sooner or later a crease opens into a hole. Patch it. Cut a piece bigger than the tear. Pin it inside the leg. Stitch round it in a thread that shows. Hem too short? Let the turn-up down. Face the raw edge with any printed cotton to hand. Leave the stitching where you can see it.

Pre-distressed jeans at streetwear prices run $41 to $120.

Cobain's Patched 501s, Sold for $412,750

These jeans had a life before him. The drummer of Babes in Toyland owned them first and is thought to have sewn the repairs in herself. Those are the patches. Then he got them, wore them in the video and to the awards show in September, and by the time NPR went to look at them they carried heavy staining, rips, patches and a psychedelic print facing a let-down hem, with the back patch gone and the red tab half torn away.

Every item on that list has a cause. Somebody sewed the patches on after the holes arrived. Somebody let the turn-up down, backing the raw edge with whatever was lying about. The label came off through friction.

Two owners put that condition into them without trying to. They sold in 2023 for $412,750.

Vedder's Cut-Off Fatigues, 1991

Harrods, London, 1991. A guard came over and asked Pearl Jam to leave the shop. Eddie Vedder offered to go up to the menswear department and buy something to change into. The guard said no, and they got walked out.

SPIN described the outfit that September: army fatigue trousers cut off at the knee with the raw edge held together by electrical tape, tie-dyed long underwear worn as the trouser, and a printed cotton rock T-shirt. Two of those three came out of a pair of hands. The fatigues are surplus that met a pair of scissors, the tape is standing in for a hem, and the long underwear is meant to go under something. SPIN stops at those three garments and does not describe his feet, so the outfit as recorded runs from the T-shirt to the knee. A department store would not have it on the premises.

The useful part of the Harrods outfit is the legs. Cut-offs over a thin knitted layer keep the leg covered while taking weight off the top half. It also dates the shape. Harrods threw them out in September 1991. Something close to it went down the Perry Ellis runway about a year later.

Which Pieces to Buy New and Which to Buy Used

Six garments, limited money, and the split is not obvious. Three of these reward buying new. The other three are worth more used.

Buy new where the wear is yours to put in. A plain rigid jean improves with hard daily use and infrequent washing, and buying it pre-faded pays a factory to draw creases you would have folded yourself, high on both thighs and matching. Same logic for the tee and the hat. New, from a mid-price streetwear site, those three run to about $83: $46 for the jeans, $26 for the tee, $11 for the hat.

A waffle-knit tee at $35 covers the layer, and a star-pattern beanie at $21 covers the head. The beanie is a wool blend with a brushed surface, near enough to mohair to read the same way. Its print is a drawing, not a brand name, so the check above it stays the busy thing. The shoulder seam lands on the bone. The body stops at the hip bone, leaving the plaid room to hang past it. Waffle is thermal construction, so the same shirt does duty as the printed layer or the thin one underneath.

Skeleton Waffle-Knit Tee$35A waffle sits off your skin. It keeps its own shape across the chest. Pull a plaid shirt over it, you stay flat. Sizes go M to 3XL, which leaves room to take one step up for the shirt over it. Beige. Black. There is a print on each side: the ribcage at the front, a big melted heart with distressed type across the back. Under a cardigan the front does the work. Open plaid over the top gives you the check at the front, the heart behind. Worn on its own with plain jeans, you get both prints at once. Star Pattern Knit Beanie$21Buy this one for the fuzz. Long-pile wool blend, fibres standing up off the surface. Mohair behaves like that. In a photograph it looks like a hat you have owned for years. Deep body, slouching at the back. The brim rolls over once, stopping above your hairline, so it clears your forehead all day. One size. Hand wash only. Four colours. Brown with the pink white star is the loudest of them. Black is the one that sits quietly under a hood.

Buy used where you want the cloth soft. Softness comes from wash cycles, so a new shirt has none. The shop that can supply it is a second-hand one. I pulled 383 live listings off Poshmark and Grailed to see what these cost, filtering out anything under three dollars or over six hundred. The median vintage flannel is $27, with half of them falling between $20 and $35; cardigans run $46, slips $36, and a vintage 501 $78. Set that against $139 for a new wool shirt at Pendleton and $1,450 for the same thing in The Row's spring 2026 line. New plaid at streetwear prices tends to arrive with a printed brand name across the chest or a cropped boxy body, neither of which will sit open over a tee.

Four checks in a shop. Rub the cloth for nap. Read the tag. Polyester goes back on the rail, since a blend still holds its shape after fifty washes. Check the elbows and the seams, which lighten first. Lay it flat. Measure the chest.

Boots are the one line worth overspending on. The geometry is why.

Added up, that is about $83 new plus $27 for a used plaid, so $110 for the first outfit before shoes. The cardigan version is $77 plus $46. Add $180 for a new welted boot, or $128 if you catch one on sale.

Courtney Love's Babydoll Dress, 1994

Hole released the video for "Miss World" in March 1994. The look came out of a flat that Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland shared in the eighties, where they wore each other's clothes. This video is what took it wide. Dazed has traced that route, and notes that a writer at Melody Maker gave the thing its name. Which of the two of them wore it first is still argued over by both of them.

The clothes themselves are short babydoll dresses with Peter Pan collars at the neck, satin slips cut to about the same length and worn out of the house as dresses rather than under them, white knee socks pulled up or fishnets that were torn before anybody put them on, and flat buckled Mary Janes of the kind a child gets made to wear to a wedding. On top of that goes red lipstick taken well past the lip line, dark eye makeup left where it smudged, and bleached hair pinned back with the plastic barrettes you buy in a chemist.

The wardrobe runs on a soft garment and a hard one. A satin slip goes with a buckled leather shoe, a child's collar with a smeared mouth.

To build it now: a slip, mid-calf or above the knee, straight cut, thin straps. A plain short-sleeved T-shirt underneath, which turns the dress into a pinafore and takes the evening out of it. Bare legs, opaque tights, or fishnets you have already laddered. Heavy laced boots at the bottom. Print the T-shirt as well and there is a third thing competing. The slips run a median of $36 second-hand, half of them between $26 and $55, and second-hand is the only route for this one because the shape stopped being made new in this cut.

Marc Jacobs' Grunge Collection for Perry Ellis, 1993

Courtney Love burned the parcel.

Marc Jacobs had sent samples to her and to Cobain, the way a designer sends samples to anybody whose look he has just put on a runway, presumably expecting them to be worn or at least kept, and what came back instead was a story she told WWD years afterwards about the two of them taking the box outside and setting fire to it. "We burned it. We were punkers", she said, before adding that the clothes held no interest for them. Inside that box were flannel shirts, printed granny dresses, knitted skullcaps, Dr. Martens. The shapes came off what those two already owned and wore every day. The cloth was silk and cashmere. The show went up in the autumn of 1992 for the following spring. Suzy Menkes reviewed it in three words, Jacobs lost the job over it, and years later he told the Telegraph it stayed his favourite collection.

The material is where it came apart. Cotton and denim lose colour before they lose structure. Silk snags and goes thin, and cashmere pills into felt. Cut these five shapes in those two fibres and every hour of wear takes something off the garment. The clothes could only ever look their best in the first week.

Take the five shapes from it, though. They were right then. They are right now. Buy them in cotton, wool and denim. Give them a year.

What to Take Off in August

A year of that runs into August, and four layers of cotton and wool do not. Lose the thin long sleeve. Lose the knit. The plaid stays, off the shoulders, tied at the waist. That leaves a printed tee, jeans, boots. One visible edge. Full-length denim in August.

The 1991 answer moves the layering onto the legs. Cut a pair of jeans off just above the knee. Leave the hem raw so it frays as you wash it. Run a thin knitted layer underneath to keep the leg covered and the edges back to three. Swap the boots for canvas and it is cooler again.

On 23 July 1993, indoors at the Roseland Ballroom in New York for the New Music Seminar, Cobain played in a heavy black and red striped sweater and the patched jeans.

What to Check in the Mirror Before You Leave

Start with light. Matte cotton, raw denim, fuzzy knit and polished leather all catch it differently, so four surfaces should look four ways. One even sheen across the lot means you ordered the lot at once. Keep something you have owned longer than the rest. Hold the plaid against the tee print. Only one of the two should be doing anything. Let it be the check. Hand over the hem. The back pocket edge. The seat. The elbow. Fade anywhere else, especially high and even across the front thigh, came out of a machine. Last, find the shoulder seam and put a finger on it. You are feeling for the bony point where your arm starts. On it is the fit, and just inboard of it is fine. Sitting out on the arm means the shirt is too big through the shoulder, however well the chest measures.