Distressed jeans are one of the biggest trends at the moment among models, celebs, and street style enthusiasts alike. Are you dying to get your hands on a pair but reluctant to pay the price? If you’re willing to put in a little work, we’ve got the perfect DIY distressed jeans tutorial so that you can be on trend in no-time.

distress

What you’ll need:

A pair of jeans
A couple of squares of cardboard
An x acto knife
Sand paper blocks or a dremel (look in your man’s tool box)
A pen

Now follow these steps:

Step 1. Try on your jeans and with a pen, mark right above, the center, and underneath your knee. This will help with the exact location to map out where you’ll be making the cuts later on.

Step 2. Take the cardboard squares and place them inside the jeans where the knees are. You don’t want to cut through to the backside of the jeans so these are necessary!

Step 3. Take the x acto knife and create slits where the knee is. For this you can get creative on how many you want so tailor it to your liking. You can do this to any of the pockets or even the bottom of the jeans as well.

Step 4. To create a more worn-in look, take the dremel or sandpaper block and randomly fray the jeans. This can be done to the tougher areas of the jeans like the waist to give it a softer look but can be done to any part of the jean.

Step 5. Throw them in the washer. The slits that you created probably don’t look like much right about now but after each wash the jeans will look better and with more frays.

To see how it’s done, check out the video.

 
 
(Cover image: Style.com/Article image: Stockholm Streetstyle)