Natural Indigo Jeans

In today's market place Natural Indigo Jeans are a very rear fenomenon. These type of Jeans are very expensive and require lengthy and time consuming process to get made. There are only few companies in the world that make Natural Indigo Jeans, one is Gilded Age. Almost all blue jeans are chemically dyed these days. Unofrtunatelly, chemicall dyeing usually involves toxic agents and heavy metals. Yet, even clothing produced with organically grown fibers using "low impact" dyes, requires the same toxic agents. "Low impact" means the dye is absorbed better and chlorine is not used for bleaching (usually hydrogen peroxide is used).

So what did people do before these processes were even available?

They used plant based dye such as indigo and madder. These natural dyes tended tof ade after repeated washings, but that was considered appealing. Each piece of clothing took on its own unique character by the variation of color.

Natural Indigo is perhaps the oldest dye known to men and the oldest fragments of clothes found are dyed with it. Natural Indigo is also one of the "fastest" dyes known. It was the original dye of the "Levis" blue jeans.

Old New England Textile Mill
It also takes quite few highly skilled people, taught through generations in the old ways of dyeing and weaving. Firstly the yarns are ring spun. This process is slower and more labour intensive then the method used in

mass production today. It uses a longer fiber that results in a yarn that has a characteristic natural slubs and unevenness. Then the yarn needs to be dyed.

"Boston Blue" natural indigo jeans

Our Indigo Jeans are 100% pure plant indigo: Pollygonum. The ring spun yarns used for these jeans are rope dyed. That means that the yarns are hand twisted into ropes before being dipped into the barrels of indigo dye. They are then squeezed and oxidized by hand when they are still in ropes. After repeating the process over and over again, the ropes have deep blue color.

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