distressed jeans

Distressed jeans are denim pants deliberately made to look worn, faded, or damaged.

The distressing—holes, frays, abrasions, and bleached patches—is applied during manufacturing to achieve a broken-in appearance without years of actual wear.

Once a marker of poverty or hard labor, the look became fashionable in the late twentieth century: She paid two hundred dollars for jeans with holes in the knees.