"As for clothes, I flatly refused to wash them. I made sure we all bought loose-fitting clothes that let us do squats and windmill our arms - none of that tight buttoned-up stuff like my mother favored. We wore our shirts till they got dirty, then we put them on backward and wore them until that side got dirty, then we wore them inside out, then inside out backward. We were getting four times more wear out of each shirt than persnickety folks [in town] did. When the shirts reached the point where Jim was joking about them scaring the cattle, I'd take the whole pile into Seligman [Arizona] and pay by the pound to have them all steam-cleaned."
"Levi's we didn't wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil - and then we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi's reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn't get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but brier-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi's reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn't pay a cowboy to let you wash his."
Quote from Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
