Kim Kardashian Photograph by Clint Brewer/Splash News/Corbis.

In 1986, I spent some time in Nicaragua, at a decrepit hotel in Granada, the former capital. It was during the Contra war, and the hotel didn’t have many guests apart from a cadre of Soviet “advisers,” who played poker all night under a bare light bulb (my room faced theirs across an air shaft, and we were kept awake until dawn fending off mosquitoes), and some members of a film crew working on “Walker,” a postmodern bio-pic, directed by Alex Cox, about William Walker, the American soldier of fortune who conquered Nicaragua, in 1856, with a band of mercenaries. One of the actors was Spider Stacey, a founder of the Irish punk-rock band the Pogues, who liked to hang out in the lobby watching Japanese monster movies on the old console TV. He seemed to never change his clothes (though, to be fair, there wasn’t any laundry service), and his signature garment was a pair of flamboyantly shredded jeans with gaping holes at the knees. They looked as if a wild animal, which there were many of in the war zone to the north—jaguars, ocelots, capuchin monkeys—had gone at them tooth and claw. I had to wonder what the destitute Nicaraguans made of them.

It now appears, according to an article on the British Web site the Conversation, that jeans savaged by wild animals are a trend in designer sportswear. A Japanese denim brand had the bright idea, at least for raising its profile, of sewing indigo-dyed cotton fabric around rimless tires, sausage-shaped bolsters, and fat rubber balls, and throwing the objects to the inmates of the Kamine Zoo, in Hitachi City. In an accompanying video, the beasts bound from their cages and fall upon their novel chew toys with such relish that you have to wonder if there isn’t a little catnip involved. The scene reminded me of toddlers on Christmas morning, tumbling down the stairs, unable to contain their excitement, and tearing into the neatly wrapped parcels under the tree.

When the fabric has been properly “distressed”—i.e., mauled—it is retrieved from the enclosures and made into trousers that are sold under the label Zoo Jeans. (The Japanese are avid consumers of premium denim, the funkier the better. The national obsession with jeans started during the postwar occupation, when teen-agers became smitten with the dungarees worn by their conquerors.) But, “rather than simply being a marketing gimmick, there is actually value in this from an animal welfare perspective,” the article explains. “Involving lions and the zoo’s other large carnivores”—tigers and bears—“in the activity is part of what’s called environmental enrichment. This is the provision of stimuli to help improve well-being. It’s a win-win activity for many zoos, who can make alternative profits from their animals, which tend to be used to provide extra facilities for them.”

Notice the caveat: “tend to be.” Three pairs of the jeans were auctioned, on July 7th, at a benefit for the zoo. The bidding on “T-1,” a model “designed” by the tigers, reached twelve hundred dollars. There were, inexplicably, no takers for “L-1,” pawed and gnawed at by the lions, or for “B-1,” a tag-team effort by two chubby bears (which, I thought, had the most artful lacerations). The destination of the other jeans seems to be upscale department stores, although a buyer at Selfridges, in London, complained that the rips were “too sporadic.”

Throwing denim to lions is a relatively lazy way to distress it, if one is to judge by the advice found online. A writer on Hypebeast suggests duct-taping new jeans to the tires of your car before driving around the block. “Do a couple [of] donuts, burnouts, etc. … then rotate and repeat.” Another post recommended taking a cheese grater to the fabric. Shawn Joswich, a “customized-denim professional” who works for a boutique in Brooklyn that cures jeans for Barneys, uses a power drill. And then there’s Josh Le, a Canadian college student who seasoned a pair of raw-denim Nudie Jeans (a hundred sixty-five dollars) by wearing them three hundred and thirty times, in the course of fifteen months, without a wash. Mothers of boys will not be surprised by Le’s experiment (it was for a science class); my own son used to abrade the hems of his jeans on the sidewalk.

Males of all stripes (no pun intended) seem to have an atavistic thing for gaminess. Two months ago, Charles (Chip) Bergh, the middle-aged C.E.O. of Levi Strauss, who earns about ten million dollars a year, announced, at a conference in California, that “real denim aficionados never put their threads near soap and water.” Bergh looked pretty spiffy in a pair of Levis that, he said, he had been wearing, unwashed, for a year, adding, “I have yet to get a skin disease.” (You can’t tell from the photograph what olfactory stimuli the jeans are providing to the captive audience.)

Not long ago, I wrote about the world’s oldest trousers, a Neolithic garment unearthed in China. The world’s oldest bluejeans date to only 1873, when Levi Strauss, the proprietor of a dry-goods store in San Francisco, and his partner, Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno who bought Strauss’s denim, patented a pair of riveted work pants that they marketed to ranch hands, lumberjacks, and railroad workers. The company they founded currently employs an archivist for its collection of vintage Leviana, and its vaults hold a pair of jeans from 1879 that is insured for a hundred fifty thousand dollars. It is likely that the odd animal—a packhorse, a hog, a rattler, a recalcitrant steer, perhaps, or a mountain lion—took a go at distressing them. Who knew, back then, that it would be a win-win collaboration between jean and beast?

You may suppose that dressing like the indigent, in rags and tatters, to make a statement about art, politics, or identity, started with the punks. But Count Tolstoy adopted the rough homespuns of Russian serfs, along with a credo of “voluntary poverty,” inspired by Christ and Buddha, that wasn’t popular with his family members. In the nineteen-twenties, Paul Poiret accused no less than Chanel of perpetrating a look that he called la misère de luxe: costly couture outfits made from jersey tricot, a proletarian fabric formerly used only for work clothes and men’s underwear. It was suddenly chic to look as though you had something better to do, and to think about, than changing an effete toilette three times a day. People who do manual labor dress for comfort, so it makes sense to imitate them, but that is different from sartorial slumming. Levis first reached the East Coast in the luggage of rich vacationers who had seen them on dude ranches. Since then, the lust for “authenticity” has proved to be a lucrative contagion. Middle-class kids spend billions to project street cred; supermodels weigh as little as famine victims; designers channel the swagger of nomadic tribesmen; convicts set the standards for body art; the guerilla uniform of aviators, camouflage, and a knitted cap is a perennial favorite for celebrities incognito. Thus do the least oppressed citizens of the world express their imagined solidarity—expensively, in one respect; cheaply, in another—with the most marginal. You invert an hourglass when the sand runs out, and the fashion world inverts the social hierarchy when the trappings of privilege lose their glamour. But it’s also a conceit that we owe to the Romantics: in a civilized milieu, ferocity confers cachet. The upshot is a pair of jeans, pummelled by a bored animal—a slave laborer, you might say—with a four-digit price tag.