Diesel is selling 'virus-fighting' denim, but experts say it's just a marketing ploy

• Diesel is now selling "anti-viral" jeans that use a textile solution that claims to have "the capacity to disable over 99% of viral activity within two hours of contact between pathogens and fabric."
• However, experts told Business Insider the jeans are not effective in preventing the spread of the virus, given existing research shows it is airborne in nature and rarely spread through surface contact.
• "At the end of the day, you've just got a pair of overpriced jeans that is giving consumers a false sense of security," said Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
• Diesel did not respond to Business Insider's request to comment.

Denim sales may have taken a nosedive as quarantined Americans continue to trade in hard pants for soft pants, but Diesel is hoping its new "virus-fighting" jeans might entice them to reunite with the jilted fabric.

The denim brand recently announced a new "ultra-innovative denim treatment" developed using ViralOff, a solution made by Swedish chemical company Polygiene. According to Polygiene, the formula has "the capacity to disable over 99% of viral activity within two hours of contact between pathogens and fabric" and was first used during the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.

However, experts told Business Insider the "anti-viral" denim is more gimmick than effective virus-prevention tool.

According to Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the pants are more or less futile given existing research shows the virus is primarily airborne in nature and rarely spreads through surface contact.

"The short of it is, I don't know why you would want an anti-microbial-coated pair of jeans, especially for a virus that is primarily spreading by aerosol," Graham said. "At the end of the day, you've just got a pair of overpriced jeans that is giving consumers a false sense of security."

Ultimately, Graham said the effort just "feels like marketing," noting there is no evidence that the virus is spread via the surface of textiles through the skin, buttocks, or genitals — regions that jeans typically encase.

"It's not going to be any more safe than any other pair of pants. That's not the route of transmission," she said. "Though if you're putting your pants up to your face, you need to wash them."

Caitlin Howell, an assistant professor at the University of Maine's Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, echoed Graham and said consumers should be especially cautious about products that make claims of virus-prevention.

"We need to be very careful to verify and validate new solutions as people will rely on them to be effective," Howell wrote in an email to Business Insider. "As a scientist, I'm very conservative. There's no way that this company could know that this treatment is 99% effective across every kind of virus in every situation."

Further, a closer look at the fine print on the Polygiene site further shows that ViralOff is "not intended to prevent disease" and "is used for the protection of the treated product." Diesel did not respond to Business Insider's request to comment.

While the Diesel jeans may do little to fend off the coronavirus, they may help the company carve a competitive edge in an already flailing sector of the market. The pandemic has wreaked havoc on several companies best known for their denim, including Lucky Brand, True Religion, and G-Star RAW which all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since the outbreak hit the US.

Even those that have avoided bankruptcy thus far are just skirting by: Levi's announced plans to cut 15% of its total workforce in response to slumping sales due to temporarily shuttered stores and shifting consumer demand. According to data from the NPD Group cited by the Washington Post, denim sales have declined by double digits in the past three months since the onset of the pandemic, compared to the same period in 2019.

"People just aren't wearing jeans right now," Tiffany Hogan, an apparel analyst at Kantar, told The Washington Post. "They're living in comfort as much as they can, which is accelerating a trend we were already seeing."