Stone Island’s Instructions for Authenticity

How a pair of jeans turned wear into a performance.

Twenty years ago, Stone Island released a pair of jeans that came packaged with a set of printed instructions and a small sandpaper glove. The idea was simple: you could age your own denim at home. The instructions told you to place your usual pocket contents inside — keys, wallet, coins — then rub the glove over the raised areas of the fabric to create creases, scuffs, and fading.

It was a strange kind of intimacy, as if the brand were choreographing the life you were supposed to have lived. Wear had become a process to follow, a system for achieving authenticity. The marks of time could now be applied on command.

Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive sets out how worn clothing has carried meaning across history. For most of that time, newness equalled status. Those who could afford it wore clothes that were clean, freshly pressed, and quickly replaced. Working clothes, by contrast, had to endure. They were patched, frayed, and mended until they carried a record of labour and life. Every mark was biographical, a visible memory of work done.

Ellen Sampson has described wear as “an index of the absent body,” each crease and stain a trace of touch. That physical record of life once carried value, especially for men whose clothing reflected the physicality of labour. But by the late twentieth century, when automation and service work replaced the dirt and danger of manual trades, the worn look became an aesthetic rather than a fact. Factories began producing garments that looked pre-worn, scuffed and faded straight from the box.

This shift sits within a broader phenomenon that sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon called “vacationing in poverty.” She described “the rational consumption of poverty” — how middle-class consumers bought into the appearance of toil, risk, and authenticity. In menswear, that meant jeans and jackets artificially dirtied, faded, or frayed. These garments are stained with an idealised notion of masculine authenticity, produced not through the labour of their current owners but by low-paid factory workers using industrial processes such as sandblasting, bleaching and fraying.

The Stone Island sandpaper glove takes that logic a step further. It doesn’t just reproduce wear — it delegates it. Instead of the factory doing the distressing, the consumer becomes a kind of home-based worker, completing the product through a ritual of simulated use. The difference between real and fake doesn’t disappear; it becomes the point. The process of ageing the jeans is what authenticates the wearer, even as it exposes the artificiality of the act.

This fetish for the aesthetics of wear has long fascinated menswear. As Hardy Amies observed in 1964, a man should look as if he had “bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them.” The right kind of neglect was a marker of taste. Stone Island systematised that attitude, turning the casual into the procedural.

Seen today, the glove and its instructions feel like a parody of control. They belong to an era obsessed with precision, when even natural wear could be artificially engineered. Yet they also point towards a different kind of manipulation. Digital tools now let us clean and perfect images, stripping away the very traces that once signalled use.

That tension sits at the centre of the Barbican’s current exhibition Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion.

Among the garments on display is a jacket from the Westminster Menswear Archive by Carol Christian Poell, from his Autumn/Winter 2002 collection Attraction. At first it appears heavily worn, but its weathered look is created through flocking, a process where fibres are electrostatically bonded to the surface. The result is an imitation of age, a visual residue of time applied through technical precision.

Set alongside Stone Island’s sandpaper glove, Poell’s jacket shows how deep this fixation runs. Both garments are about transformation through surface, the deliberate blurring of labour, time, and fabrication. Poell’s jacket achieves its wornness through electricity and glue, the Stone Island jeans through user participation. Each performs the same fantasy: that authenticity can be faked, fashioned, or forged.

Both garments emerged within two years of each other: Poell’s jacket in 2002 and the Stone Island jeans in 2004. They belong to a moment when the marks of manual labour were disappearing from Western life, but still haunted men’s clothing as an aesthetic ideal. Once physical work stopped leaving its trace on the body, its marks returned as middle-class nostalgia, a performance of effort by those never required to do it.

The physical evidence of use — frayed seams, worn elbows, ingrained dirt — was now fabricated in the same supply chains that erased the conditions it imitated. These two garments mark the moment when men’s clothing stopped recording labour and started staging its loss.

What once marked labour now exists as a luxury finish for those untouched by the work it imitates.