Priced at around $40, it’s hard to find raw selvedge going for much cheaper, and aside from the obvious use of lightweight denim, Chinese manufacturing (not necessarily a bad thing) and a rather conservative feature set, there’s nothing blatantly off-putting about these Uniqlo selvedge jeans. However, one thing I wish they had is a button up fly. These jeans are model S002, which are a straight leg cut, but I’m not sure how the fit will change after their first shrink.

From what I’ve heard, Uniqlo selvedge tends to bleed quite easily, which means producing distress patterns should take a lot less effort than my documented battle with a much more expensive brand. We’ll see how they stand up to daily abuse over the next couple of months; I’ll have to post a follow-up documenting my progress. Until then, I’d better avoid wearing susceptible clothing and sitting on light colored furniture, but hey, that’s all part of the ritual and sacrifice in producing a highly customized look! The way I see it, for the bargain that they are, it’s more of a risk of my time than money.

It’s been about a year since I last wrote about my pair of Evisu No. 1 Lot 2000 raw selvedge jeans that I bought from the original Evisu store in Umeda, Osaka. With another 600 hours of wear, I can still say that they are somewhat difficult to break down; however, things have progressed nicely since my last report, and I am optimistic that the final outcome will be good!

And I should clarify – when I quote 600 hours of wear, I am referring to logged work time at my laboring job. The amount of time might not seem like much (now a lifetime total of 1200 hours), but I spend more than 95% of that time in motion, doing various physical activities. Unfortunately, these activities don’t seem very proficient at producing the distressed patterns that I had hoped to achieve. Maybe I should try farming or construction instead (yea, right!).

The Damage

Inspecting the front of the pants, there’s obviously more visible wear than the last time I checked. Areas around the pockets and button up fly have begun to rub down nicely, with further distressing continuing down the thighs. Around each knee, there are two circular areas that have been rubbed down, but they are now merging into one. This was caused by wearing the jeans for a while before they were shrunk. I’ll speak more of this in a bit.

At the bottom of each leg there’s a few contrast lines emerging. As these jeans have not been hemmed, they tend to bunch up around the ankles to create these nice artifacts.

Turning the denim over, things are not going quite so well. Although the right rear pocket with the hand painted Evisu logo shows a fair amount of wear – due to a tool being worn on that side – the rest of the rear remains virtually untouched! Only the bottom of each pant leg show visible signs of wear. This is also a spot where a small hole has developed. I’ll probably stitch it up before it gets out of hand.

Size and Shrinkage

Regarding the shrinking of these jeans, when I first brought them home over two years ago, I figured the last thing I should do was to wash them. Owners of raw unsanfortized denim want to rub off the indigo dye through natural wear, not uniformly lighten the color through machine washes. So I took them to work and wore them in their native gargantuan size for several months.

After a while, I realized that wearing the jeans in their unshrunken state wasn’t producing much wear – there just wasn’t enough friction between the body and the denim to get the process started. The exception was the area around the knees, which is why there are now distressed spots slightly above the knee caps (these areas have seemingly been raised now that the jeans have been shorted by the shrink). If I could go back and do it again, I would have definitely shrunk them right away and avoided the wait.

I’ve only washed the jeans a couple times in the last 2 years, and if they didn’t get so dirty at work, I’d probably wash them even less. However, washing them present a good opportunity to assess how much wear has taken place – something that’s difficult to see through all the dirt and grime that accumulates on the surface. Washing also invokes a bit of shrinkage, and although much of this has been permanently cut down by the initial shrink, there’s still about an inch or so of leeway around the waist.

Because of the initial shrinkage and the continual fluctuations in size, I think that if I had bought these jeans without a professional in-store fitter, I would of bought a size too small, and would now be resorting to sadistic fabric stretching to make them fit. This is why it bothers me to mail order raw denim. Recently though, I have begun to see fitting guides for raw selvedge available from online stores. It’s about time!

So that’s my annual raw selvedge update rant. If you can still find Special No. 1 Lot 2000 Evisu jeans, and if you can actually afford them in this economy (they cost over $300 in Japan), I hope you’re either a patient person, or your job involves rolling around on pumice rocks all day. These bad boys are definitely a work in process – and probably will be for life – but this is what buying raw denim is all about!

I’ve always had a penchant for discovering zany Japanese denim, but rarely have I ever considered donning the items that I find most interesting – supreme cowardice, I know!

Fortunately, the vulgarian fad-chasing youth of Japan never seem to shy away from the hyperbolic styling of their domestic brands. Indeed, demand for superlative distressed clothing remains strong, year-after-year, especially among Osakans.

Over the past decade, demand has sustained a plethora of Japanese micro-labels that specialize in sadistically plebeianizing otherwise perfectly good denim. Take these Root Three Used jeans by Knock Store for example – a landslide of garish colors and patterns await your senses!

Starting with deep dyed denim, these garments are given a prison-style beat down, producing copious amounts of high-contrast scarring and detail. Vertical and horizontal distress patterns jump out like fresh graffiti on your car hood, with black and red paint splatters conveying your (ironic) appreciation for the higher arts.

So, are consumers of distressed fashion simply trying to find a look that is more tattered, dirty and worn than the last outfit that they wore? Not really.

Buyers of radically distressed garments are usually more concerned about subtle details and specific styling than some dreamt up quest to become the most ragged and offensive looking person in Japan (although I wouldn’t rule this out entirely). With this in mind, the distressed look has branched into innumerable micro-niches, each evolving independently to serve a particular style of destruction.

A special note of interest: Under the model’s bio, he lists soccer and hangovers as his special skills; who says it’s hard to find work during a recession!?

Juvenile Delinquent is the name of the brand, and their namesake pretty much captures what they’re all about. Typically featuring dark denim with loud ‘Asian’ patterns embroidered on each of their garments, JD appeals to a certain segment of the Japanese market who have adopted and remixed the whole hip-hop/gangsta style.

Some of these jeans interest me greatly as pieces of art, and a few I might even consider owning, but sadly, a lot of what I see from Juvenile Delinquent are items that I just couldn’t pull off wearing on any given day.

Perhaps if I was a low-ranking yakuza solider with a deep tan, cornrows and a budding MMA career, I could walk out of my apartment feeling confident with the whole JD look. But as of now, I’d probably just come off as a bizarre fake gangster/confused foreigner mishmash that would shock and offend everyone around me. Then again, isn’t that often the goal of Japanese youth fashion?!

Wind storms and rain. Fall has quite suddenly arrived and I find myself looking for a wardrobe change to compliment these muddy skies. Browsing through the October issue of Men’s Brand magazine, I found an interesting article on Blue Corn, a fairly well known denim manufacturer based in Japan. As I was about to visit their website, I somehow brought up a different URL and began checking out the website for Blue Way, another maker of Japanese denim, among other fashion products.

Blue Way is based out of Hiroshima, Japan and makes mostly bottom wear for men and women. They proudly display their Made in Nippon banner and their products cater exclusively to the Japanese domestic market.

Visiting their web store, these military inspired cargo pants really caught my eye. I like their cut and the pockets and zippers are nice details that would seem to offer great utility. Thankfully, the price is very reasonable, so maybe I’ll score a pair if I can get around to visiting one of their retail shops.

These denim cargo pants would look fit on street wandering hobos — although definitely not the Japanese variety — as those guys tend to dress (and live) better than most middle aged bachelors back home.

The distressed, paint splotched fabric, exaggerated pockets and frilly details aptly serve Japan’s current fascination for the hobo chic look. While the rest of the world debate the possible origins of this garment (a Kobe based micro-niche fashion boutique, or the dumpster behind the Salvation Army?) most Japanese would immediately recognize it as wearable art for their epicurean way of life.

The Japanese seem to love distressed and tattered clothing, and I think it’s because it is the exact opposite of what their strict and ancient culture would have them wear.

I’ve spent the occasional night at hobo camps in various Japanese cities, usually as a result of missing the last train home, and I can tell you, many of the homeless are finely groomed and decently dressed. They even have such amenities as electricity and satellite TV. So with this in mind, to think that a regular Hitoshi — not even a street camping bum — would purposely dress like a post-apocalyptic unemployed handyman is sort of tantamount to riding a Suzuki Skywave amidst a pack of Hell’s Angels. It’s this rebellious attitude that continues to be a driving force behind much of Japan’s youth and street fashion.

I’m loving all the details worked into these Red Pepper jeans. The stitching, zippers, studs, and chaotic distress patterns are the kinds of features that you’d expect from a highly stylized pair of Japanese jeans.

The look is reminiscent of LA’s denim scene, and in certain ways Osaka can be seen as the West Coast equivalent for streetwear fashion in Japan. In comparison, Tokyo often shows a more sophisticated and conservative dress code that can be found in world cities like New York and Paris. Indeed, the rest of Japan seems to think that the people of Osaka lack refinement in both their dress and mannerism – and Osaka’s dwellers hardly disagree! Known for their loud, expressive and somewhat aggressive behavior, Osaka remains true to her merchant roots, and what these people seemingly lack in taste, they compensate with personality and humor.

Like, if a 50-year old Mama-san wearing shredded jeans and a shirt covered in skulls and pistols wants to know if you’re waiting in line or simply loitering near a checkout till, she’ll likely elbow her way past you muttering something about your greasy forehead and nauseating odor. And god bless her. This is the real Osaka they didn’t mention in the travel brochure!

These authentic Levi’s 201, No. 2, 1911 style jeans are being sold for a cool $33,000 – a bargain price, the seller claims. This low-ounce selvedge denim features suspender hooks and an adjustment buckle on the back. The stitching is linen and the patch is made of fabric (not leather).

Obviously these jeans are still in wearable condition and have a lot of nice distress marks that I’m assuming Napoleon or Jesus or whoever was around back then didn’t much care for. If only they knew what we know now: Never, ever throw anything out! The stylish ditch diggers of a hundred years ago could never of imagined how their streetwear tastes would one day shape the fashion world.

Soiled Speedos from your European vacation? Ziplock and store in fridge. Cheetos stained Alf shirt with suspicious dried urine blotch? Insure for $5k. We’re talking potentially priceless artifacts here – literally treasure for your grandchildren. Just think, it’ll be like handing out gold nuggets at your funeral, except in a Salvation Army kind of way. BAM! Another killer Osaka Nines idea. I’m going pay-per view with this blog. Who’s with me?

There’s something wonderful about Japanese service. On the bustling island, it is said that the customer is King, and you really begin to feel it when some minimum wage server sprints from the kitchen to your table just to shave three seconds off your wait time. In Japan, everyone is working like hell for everyone else, and they always seem to find ways to serve the customer better.

So when I saw this unusual picture of washers and dryers sitting in Denime Tokyo, I immediately thought of how cool this service would be if it were available in all denim shops. In truth, Denime Tokyo is not the only place that provides this full service. Now, other stores, like the best Evisu boutiques, have caught on and give the option to shrink and hem purchases for next-day pickup. But Denime Tokyo shortens the turnaround to a couple hours, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen washers so prominently placed in a boutique before!

When you see raw denim, in it’s clown-sized original form, stiff like cardboard and only awkwardly wearable around family members and empathizing denim connoisseurs, providing an in-store shrink and cut gives the option for immediate gratification. It’s kind of like tossing a craps table, a couple strippers, and Hunter S. Thompson’s briefcase in front of a loaded Daniel Baldwin. It gets the plastic swiping (or chopping)!

Anyway, I’d love to see this service offered by more high-end denim shops, even though I’d probably side with caution and do the shrink myself.

Ever wondered how distressed denim is made? Yea, me neither. So it came as a bit of a surprise to learn that Levi’s doesn’t loan their jeans out to impoverished Cambodian farm laborers, or hobos in LA, to get that realistic weathered look.

No. The process is performed by a crack team of denim specialists delivering all kinds of abuse to the freshly dipped cotton. It’s kind of like an S&M dungeon, but for denim. And strangely, I’m not getting off from watching any of it. Well, not as much as having a pair of raw selvedge jeans smudge all over my white seat cushions.

So, if you’ve given up on destroying your own pair of raw denim jeans, make sure to buy some from a top-notch outfit like these guys. The operatives look like they’re working out of Cadbury’s secret lair. You know, the one used during the cold war to surgically pack caramel into those scrumptious chocolate squares. Or, I’ve misinterpreted the entire scene and they’re doing something totally out of Scarface. Hey, it never hurts to drag a nasal straw across your imported third world jeans hitting all the whiskering and bleach lines. Ya never know…

Large magazine scan from Smart Max after the jump.