FUNNY OLD WORLD
fow@private-eye.co.uk
£ “I’m not nine feet tall, but my jeans are,” Carter Anderson told reporters in Portland, Oregon, “I custom-ordered them more than a year ago. They have a hundred-inch seam, and are about the length of a full-size alligator. I’m part of the ‘raw denim community’, which celebrates denim in its inkiest, unwashed form. You start off with a blank slate, wear the denim every day, and through all the weathering, you end up with a one-of-a-kind form.
“I mostly wear my nine-foot jeans bunched up when I walk, so my legs look like a stack of crushed Coke cans. I’m entered in the Indigo International, a raw denim fading competition which requires me to wear the jeans every day (it’s an honour system). I sometimes wear them unfurled, and I’m looking forward to getting holes in them, because then I can do things like roller skating, which I can’t do until there’s a hole where my feet are. I always wash them when I get home, because walking around unfurled in the city is definitely a sanitation concern. I like taking the wearing of jeans to extremes, and my videos have found a broader audience on TikTok. Realistically, most people don’t care about denim, but they do care about the World’s Longest Jeans. I might not win the competition, but the love is in the journey.” (New York Times, 16/11/25. Spotter: John O’Byrne)