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Style|His Jeans Are Gigantic. His Internet Fame Is Too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/style/jeans-carter-anderson-indigo-invitational.html
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Carter Anderson purchased an outrageous pair of pants to try to win a contest and became an unlikely social media star along the way.
Nov. 16, 2025
Carter Anderson is not nine feet tall. But his jeans are.
Every day for the past two and a half months, Mr. Anderson, 27, a building engineer from Portland, Ore., has worn a pair of gargantuan jeans from the Canadian jeans brand Naked & Famous Denim. The jeans, with a 100-inch inseam, are about the length of a full-size alligator or a brag-worthy Christmas tree. When unfurled, their legs look like the arms of the inflatable tube men that sit outside car dealerships.
“This is kind of my hobby right now,” said Mr. Anderson, who was visiting New York this month.
He is part of the “raw denim community,” a cohort of men (and it is almost entirely men) who treat wearing jeans not just as a daily necessity, but as an act of cotton-based metamorphosis bordering on fetish. For the uninformed, “raw denim” is denim in its inkiest, unwashed form. Through wear it fades, whiskers and puckers in idiosyncratic ways.
“You start off with a blank slate basically, and, through all of the weathering, you end up with a one-of-a-kind form,” Mr. Anderson said.
Men like him take wearing jeans to extremes, such that the community has started its own Olympic-like contest: the Indigo Invitational, an online “raw denim fading competition” that is in its fifth year. Mr. Anderson purchased his elephantine jeans specifically for this contest a year and a half ago.
“They’ve been lying under my bed,” said Mr. Anderson, who custom-ordered the jeans for around $400.
For the contest, Mr. Anderson is required to wear these jeans every day (it’s an honor system) and photograph their wear progress each month. To do so, he strings up the jeans, horizontally, in his house, using some 20 clip hangers. The jeans will be judged for their wear and whiskers by a panel of denim experts next September. Prizes include (what else?) free jeans.
