I don't think it's realistic for you to expect your jeans to last a lifetime.
I buy decent jeans once a year. The new pair is for daily wear. The old pair is retired for manual labor. The old-old pair is retired to when I crawl under the house.
I buy decent jeans once a year. The new pair is for daily wear. The old pair is retired for manual labor. The old-old pair is retired to when I crawl under the house.
> I buy decent jeans once a year.
WHAT? I have jeans I got 10 years ago and are still good. And they weren't even expensive
I wear the same pair daily to do pretty much everything. I work, I shop, pick the kids up, walk to my parents house, do yard work, hike, literally everything in the same pair of jeans. I don't think there's a fabric yet made that could withstand the abuse I put on them for more than a year.
Although this pair I'm about to replace is at 16 months so I will revise to say "about a year"
~$40/yr wasn't so bad.
[EDIT] Oh, and for the record, I minimized washing, though I wasn't as hardcore about it as some people who claim to go months between washes. Every wash seemed to age them a couple weeks worth of wearing.
These days, I wear a lot more wool, linen, and cotton/linen blends for light-duty, and wear a single pair of Prana Zions (very thin mid-tier hiking pants, synthetic material) for anything risky/dirty. The Zions are probably at something like 1,000 wears (for the first couple years I wore them kinda like I had my jeans before—for everything) over five years or so. About a penny per wear. Finally due to be replaced, starting to get enough holes that they're getting iffy for wearing around... people, at all. If I hadn't damaged them with sharp things a few times, they'd probably go another 500+ wears, they're not getting worn-looking anywhere, no stains have proven permanent, nor is any part of them fraying (except at the holes).