Credit: Hristo Anestev/Shutterstock

Fight off disease, and look good doing it.

Jeans are unquestionably the heartiest articles of clothing out there. I’ve owned one pair of jeans for the better part of five years, and they have maybe a single tear in them. With that heartiness in mind, it figures that it would only be a matter of time before some mad genius tried to create jeans that could resist both damage and disease.

Big-name denim brand Diesel, whose jeans you’ve likely seen on the legs of guys like Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper, recently announced their development of a new kind of denim treatment. Supposedly, this new treatment has the miraculous ability to bring 99% of viral activity on the jeans’ surface to a complete halt. This new treatment, tentatively named “ViralOff,” is being developed in a partnership between Diesel and Swedish chemicals company Polygiene, and is projected to be commercially viable in time for the Spring/Summer 2021 denim releases in January.

Credit: Polygiene

Diesel is maintaining exclusive rights to ViralOff’s formula and application process, so if this stuff works, other denim brands will either have to pony up or figure it out themselves. There’s a lot of science I won’t go into in ViralOff’s process, but the short version is that the majority of viral agents that touch the treated denim are rendered harmless in about two hours. Polygiene’s been working on this stuff for the last 20 years after the outbreak of acute respiratory syndrome in 2000.

Speaking of respiratory diseases, let’s address the elephant in the room: Polygiene doesn’t quite know yet how the coronavirus would interact with ViralOff-treated jeans, but since the virus has a record of not lasting as long on porous surfaces, they’re pretty sure things will turn out in their favor. More research is required, though maybe if we’re lucky, by the time they release, it won’t matter anymore.