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Originally Posted by goldenratio1.6
wow!, sorry iam alittle ignorant about japense denim, is that anything special since it seems expensive
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"Japanese culture is famous for its attention to detail, and jeans are no exception. Japanese denim has a cult following in Europe and America because of its amazing look and feel. It痴 different because it uses traditional production techniques that have long been abandoned elsewhere. Though far more labor-intensive -- and expensive -- the jeans produced this way have a feel and appearance that is second to none."
AskMen.com - Tokyo fashion
the factory -
岡本テキスタイル
"Little did jeans manufacturers know 20 years ago that the future of their industry was actually in the past, namely, in disused shuttle looms. Japanese denim producers, too, could not have envisioned their meteoric rise to the top of the high-end jeans market when they dusted off the long-forgotten equipment all those years ago, searching as they were for a way to make authentic vintage jeans. But rise they did as a growing number of consumers started to share their passion for old-style jeans.
Entrepreneur Yoshiyuki Hayashi was 31 when he launched the Denime brand in 1988. His goal was to recreate the classic American jeans from the 1950s. Hayashi's obsession led him to Okayama Prefecture, a traditional cotton weaving area also known for its indigo dying and denim production. He asked numerous textile makers whether they could produce a denim of unusual quality-rough, stiff and shrinks when washed-opposed to the smooth, even-textured jeans that populated the market at the time. His fortunes turned when he found Shinya, a textile maker located in Ibara, whose then president Masahiro Sato suggested recreating the garments using a shuttle loom collecting dust in the corner of his shop. Such looms nearly became obsolete after jeans exploded onto the fashion scene in Japan in the 1970s, ushering in the use of more efficient looms.
Sato restored his shuttle loom and experimented until he finally reproduced a denim that matched a sample given to him by Hayashi. Hayashi and Sato were not alone in their quest to create the perfect pair of vintage jeans. The 1980s saw a surge of interest in vintage jeans, which attracted a number of enterprising individuals to the scene, including Shigeharu Tagaki, who designed jeans for the Studio D'Artisan brand in 1982 and is considered one of the architects behind today's vintage jeans fad. He recalls how difficult it was at the time to get started.
"We would hear about a shuttle loom, but then it would turn out to be a machine that could only produce kimono fabric," the 58-year-old said. "And when we finally found a real one, the owners would say, `We'll only accept orders of a minimum 3,000 meters.'" Another pioneer in the field, Mikiharu Tsujita, 38, established the Fullcount brand in 1992. Through the mediation of textile maker Collect Co. of Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, Tsujita also tapped Shinya for denim. Collect's managing director, Masahiro Suwaki, says making the denim for brands like Fullcount was a labor of love that paid off in the end. "Textile producers had to revive the techniques they had discarded in the name of efficiency during a prolonged downturn," said Suwaki. "It was hard, but we learned a lot about high-end denim manufacturing."
Hidehiko Yamane, who founded the Evisu brand, shares the obsession for quality vintage jeans. "I wanted to make classy jeans using only domestic resources," he said. After recreating the fabric's vintage textures, the pioneers went on to produce the faded look of well-worn jeans. Sable Co. in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, developed functioning models of the body from the hips down that literally wear the jeans to ensure that wrinkles-and the discoloration-appear in places such as the joints that are first to fade naturally. By the mid-1990s, Japanese jeans started to find a following at home and abroad, despite being priced at over 20,000 yen a pair.
The interest soon prompted other denim producers to revive shuttle looms, including major manufacturers, and the techniques that originated in Japan are now a global standard. One stroke of luck for the Japanese producers was that jeans makers in the United States lacked not only shuttle looms but the skilled workers to operate such machinery, as the country had shifted to mass-production much earlier than Japan. That meant Japanese textile makers were well-positioned to reap the fruit of their labor."
taken from superfuture. But if you are afraid of mean people on the internet I would avoid it.
