Thank you so much for asking questions, really. Talking so much about how jeans look after so many washes, I totally should have mentioned how I actually washed them 😅

Anyway, I either use a regular cotton cycle (usually runs for about 2–2.5 hours) or a rapid wash (30 minutes), depending on how dirty jeans feel to me. The only three principles that I follow are washing jeans inside out, at 30° C, and separately from other items.

Washing the jeans inside out is crucial to me because it prevents weird creasing fades that you mention. Although machine wash in general and more frequent machine wash in particular does lead to a more contrasty, almost lightning bolt-like fading pattern around stitching — I mention this in the article. I haven't seen such a pattern on the pairs that I only hand-washed. The pair from the article doesn't feel artificial to me because of the pattern, I actually dig it.

I don't use temperature above 30° C because I feel like denim continues to shrink even after numerous washes. It does stretch back in the waist but because the fabric doesn't experience much stretch throughout the leg when wearing, over time many of my jeans turned from regular-fitting into skinny. I talked about this in my other article: vctnson.substack.com/i/…

I don't really have any reasoning for washing jeans separately, it's just a habit.