I would never wear new clothing without washing it first, and for this exact reason. I recall Jordache jeans being notorious for this back in the '80s.
The stainer owes reparations to the chair owner. Both time and money are required. Time to research a truly worthy cleaning service, and to carry/transport the chair there and back again. Money to effect the cleaning or repair. If the cleaning doesn’t work, then the stainer needs to find the same fabric the owner used, and have it replaced. If the same fabric can’t be found, then I’m afraid making both chairs match again is required.
Whether or not the fabric was a good choice is completely outside the matter. The stainer was plainly wrong to sit in what he knew to be a precious vintage piece of furniture. Who does that? Who even sits without waiting to be invited? A project like that should be admired and respected, not “flopped” upon.
All that being said, $650 seems rather a high price to name off the bat, without first having looked into cleaning services.
In the end, your reasons for wanting to keep this friend do not in any way describe a friendly relationship. It’s clearly a transactional relationship in your mind, which makes it even more important to correctly repair the damage.
Possibility one: the op had no idea that normal use of a chair would harm it any way and neither did the owner of the chair. Lesson learned by both. More responsibility to the owner of the chair, who chose such a delicate fabric and then just put it where it would be used in typical chair fashion, than to the guest who just sat as guests normally do if not in a museum. But offering to pay for cleaning would be gracious. Asking for the guest to pay for re-reupholstery is absurd. Did he not even Scotchgard it?
Possibility two: the owner knew the chair’s fabric was that fragile and the guest had no idea that it was. Bad and risky choice and a guest using the chair as a chair when it is placed in a way for it to be used as such is what should be expected. Harm to the chair is completely on his head. His immediately getting “all bug-eyed” as soon as the chair was sat on suggests such is the case. The fact that the guest had been wearing the jeans elsewhere without causing harm suggest that he both had no idea that such could occur and that there was something particularly fragile about this chair fabric. Yes a light colored suede is a risky fabric to use. The reupholsterer should have warned him and at least tried to convince him of a different choice.
Clearly the guest did not behave negligently. The chair became damaged during usual and customary chair use and if it was not to be used in that manner then the owner had the onus to protect it from such.
The value of the relationship (as odd as the value may be judged by the op) may make offering to pay worth it but ethically … no.
Regarding jeans staining:
Most of the nice jeans I’ve bought in the last few years (from Nordstrom’s) have done this (color rubs off on skin etc.), even after multiple washings.
I never had it happen back when I used to buy Levi’s so not sure what’s up.
I don’t see that the OP claims he had worn the jeans elsewhere without the dye bleeding. He says he “didn’t think about that before I sat down”, which doesn’t sound like he was surprised the jeans might bleed, just that he wasn’t thinking about it in the moment.
AFAIK there’s no way for the fabric of the chair to cause the jeans to bleed, although the dye could be more obvious/harder to clean depending on the fabric of the chair.
Some of the comments here are veering into the personal, and teasing references to the OP’s posting history, shots at his username, etc. are not appropriate for this thread. There’s a Pit for that. Please don’t threadshit.
Minimally it seems highly improbable that the op put the jeans on for the very first time and came directly over to his friend’s condo without sitting anywhere else in the meantime.
Suede (the real stuff, not the synthetic microfiber suede) is known to be an extremely easily stained material. You can, and should, use a protectant on it, and know how to clean it in case of staining. A guest should not be expected to know of its fragility and might reasonably think “leather = durable and tough”. The person who chose that material for his beloved chair is reasonably expected however to be aware of special nature of the choice.
Reupholstering a chair in a light tone real suede? My dad ran a reupholstery shop and he would have simply refused to do it. A velvet for an antique Louis XV Bergere maybe. Suede was a stupid choice.
I am kinda with the OP here. Obviously the friend, who chose BEIGE SUEDE for his chairs, knew that they were, let’s see what’s the term, I think delicate. So this is kind of on him. (Cite: the friend immediately got all bug-eyed. So he knew.)
Chairs are to be sat on, and if your chairs are too delicate to be sat on, they should be displayed behind velvet ropes.
If they are too delicate to be sat on except by people in immaculate evening dress, they should be put away until you have a situation where all your guests are in immaculate evening dress.
If you have a chair that’s so delicate that it may collapse under the weight of one of your friends and you invite that friend over, put that chair in the garage for the duration.
And so on.
Or at the very least the friend should say, quickly, “Oh, no, don’t sit there!”
Now of course the polite thing is for the OP to offer to pay for getting the damage fixed, and for the owner of the chair to say, “Oh no, hey, it’s no problem.” Looks like an etiquette breakdown all around. I think the fair thing to do is to split the difference.
It’s a sign of a distressed friendship that the owner of the chair wants the sitter to pay for the damage caused by normal use of the object in question. Not to say that you shouldn’t oblige him, but it’s not a good sign. I’m very very suspicious that the roles are actually reversed and he’s trying to get support that his friend owes it to him to pay for the damage despite it being caused by perfectly ordinary use. As noted above, he’s very very careful to play up the importance of the chair and indicate the reason the problem occurred. I don’t think I’d ever admit to anyone ever that I would need a friend because of things he has, women he knows, or knowledge he sometimes bestows on me. It sounds a whole lot more like they’re the kind of things that someone thinks makes them an important friend for someone else, important enough that he can get them to pay for this despite it being a dick move.
I was not suggesting that he had, although that wouldn’t be the fishiest thing about this story. I was pointing out that the OP did not say he’d worn the jeans before without problems. For all we know they’d been bleeding all over the place. Even if they hadn’t been noticeably bleeding before, jeans that are likely to bleed are typically sold with a warning label. The OP didn’t claim to have been surprised when the dye transferred onto the chair, he just said hadn’t thought about it before sitting down.
If the incident actually happened as described, then I do not consider it plausible that the OP was unaware that his jeans might leave dye on a light-colored chair.
The friend has two special, precious, antique chairs that he’s spent a lot of money on and is very proud of. You don’t just throw yourself down suddenly and roughly on the chair without asking permission. That would be highly disrespectful at any time.
The jeans with the weird dye (I’ve also never heard of this happening before) are 100% the OP’s responsibility. If you damage someone’s property, even unintentionally, it’s right that you should pay for it. The friend shouldn’t have to pay.
If your only interest in the person is using him for betting advice and introductions to women - then he’s not a friend, he’s someone you’re taking advantage of.
If the guest was indeed aware that his jeans might stain the chair’s fabric then no question he was negligent and in the wrong.
DkTrdGuy?
And also to DkTrdGuy, what cleaning method was attempted?
Meanwhile the responses in this thread illustrate that many people are not aware that many blue jeans, and not even restricted to new ones, can stain light colored suede, or that light colored suede is particularly prone to staining and color transfer.
If, for the sake of the hypothetical, one of the many posters here who are unaware of those two facts, sat in a chair as an invited guest to the house, and some color transfer occurred, would they feel they owed the owner the $650 cost of a complete redo?
Let me give a different hypothetical and see how people feel about it. A friend just got delivery of a Tesla Model 3 that he is very excited about and you come over to look at it. The hood is open and you go and close it the way all of us normally close a hood. The Model 3 however has a hood that needs to be closed in a very specific manner and if not it can crease. You damage the hood closing it. Should you pay for your friend to buy a new Model 3? For the cost of replacing the hood?
Also a Bergere has a loose seat cushion. Even if the cushion was irreparably damaged it could be reupholstered without redoing the whole chair. (Potential problem being the exact match between pieces of suede.)
GreenWyvern, a Bergere is also a solid piece of furniture with a deep seat, not a delicate parlor chair. It was a chair designed as a comfy chair, a lounge chair, as close to an “easy chair” as the era got. It can handle even a football player flopping into it and the average antique Bergere has been “flopped into” many many times. The damage was not caused by how the guest sat in the chair and would have occurred no matter how delicately he lowered himself down.
I think that the friend has created an “attractive nuisance” by deliberately placing chairs that are easy to stain in a convenient location. The OP is an invitee who had every right to expect that he would not suffer any harm by availing himself of the chair(s). The monetary value of the emotional distress suffered by the OP after learning he had unintentionally damaged a valuable chair surely runs into five figures. The OP deserves compensation. Retain an attorney…immediately.
DSeid I basically agree with you that a great deal hinges on what OP knew and what it is reasonable for people to be expected to know.
For some reason your Tesla analogy isn’t working for me though! Immediately pops up my parents as an inner voice insisting you leave others’ stuff in the same state you found it in–which, among other things, meant if a thing was open, you left it open, if closed, you left it closed.
So in a case like that, I’d definitely feel responsibility to pay for the hood.
In the chair/jeans case, I’d feel responsibility to help even though I didn’t know about the jean staining thing, simply because I had (apparently) “plopped down” on a pretty precious and old piece of furniture. I’d feel like after treating something fragile with such little care, I had some onus to make up for the consequences whatever they were.
Having said that, if I didn’t perceive myself as “plopping” and treating something fragile without care, if instead I saw myself as simply sitting on a thing made for sitting, I’d feel a lot less responsibility.
I was once at an art exhibit which had a sign next to it prominently begging museum goers not to touch the exhibit. Of course such signs are fairly common but this one was really prominent and there was something about the exhibit–its visual texture, its brightness, the round and weird shape of it–that to me just begged to be touched.
I was a kid–a high schooler but anyway–and I touched it. And my fingers were immediately stained with whatever weird chalky dye-filled substance was covering the exhibit.
To this day I am not sure whether that was part of the art’s intended experience, or if I just touched something I wasn’t supposed to touch.
