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Second installment in the interview series from Nest Clothing, this time interviewing Sushi. Great insight into the history of and inspiration of Freewheelers, their design ideology and what is important to him when creating these clothes.

Had some repairs done on my 601RB. Love the fabric and cut. Would buy again, but still plenty of life left in these.

For a very good friend (despite selling a pair of 47s) Outer: La Bretagna - Arizona Raw in T. Moro (testa di moro) Inner: La Perla Azzurra - Alaska in Natural

Wickett & Craig bridle, sueded veg tan cobra, onyx and carnelian gemstones and antique nickel hardware

Son of a Stag hemming is spot on in my experience Our very own @Mr Black did a great job on my Denime 220s last time round A chap called David at Soldier Blue has also done a top job on two pairs of Canes previously, using cotton thread from his own supply to get a thread match

UVEX Pheos protective glasses. https://www.uvex-safety-shop.de/produkt/Gesamtkatalog/Augenschutz/Buegelbrillen/9192180_uvex-pheos-guard-Buegelbrille-aussen-kratzfest,-innen-dauerhaft-beschlagfrei?gv_refer=catsearch

Tremendous collection

Yes I have a old evisus no1 new yaman labour and yaman industry and it’s all the same denim will take photos and post when I get time

+ 1 for Clutch Cafe. I've only ever had my hems done by them (5 pairs now) and they've always been great. About to find out about Son of a Stag's hemming next week. This is always via post and turnaround has been ~7 days each time so can't speak to while you wait availability.

🤣 … on its way shortly 👍

nobody is perfect except for that wallet right there!

There’s always been a part of the whole…online milieu…that’s been a really weird and uncomfortable seeming bunch. Take a few wrong turns down various denim adjacent rabbit holes (nostalgia, for instance) and you can end up in some bad places.

The discussion above reminds me of why I stick with this hobby -- it's you. Yes, I started out close to 20 years ago looking for a pair of jeans to replace my $39 Levi's 550s bought at Sears. I really didn't care that they had poly stitching or were made in Malaysia. They were just too big and wide. So I took them to the Levi's store in San Francisco and found a wonderful seamstress (Melissa Vu) working in the LVC Dept (long gone). She altered them and they fit perfectly -- I still have them and, truth be told, they fit better than a lot of the jeans I've bought since. And the denim is great too, with a weight and texture that is oddly hard to find (a topic for another discussion). Anyway, I have a few hobbies and what keeps me in them is the people (i.e., not just those who make the product but those who appreciate it). The average person could give a damn beyond, 'Do these jeans look good on me, does my butt look too big?'. The kind of people who care about stitching and rivets are the same people who appreciate what makes a Leica lens special (new or old), or a tube amp sound sweet and liquid, etc.

Yes, I got these raw so they shrank quite a bit to the tag size. I never knew the back patch starts off de-bossed before

It looks and feels slightly smoother. I had heard this new version has 2 kinds of warps and the weft is a little thin and twisted harder. Here's the 42s after 2 initial washes

Not jeans, but my girlfriend asked me to fix some of her grocery bags and a t-shirt. I don't know if the bags will hold, but it was worth a shot. Only time will tell. As for the shirt, she's gonna have to live with the purple since I didn't feel like threading any white thread onto my serger lol.

@MJF9 here - it’s sweltering right now so not actually wearing this now, but hopefully again soon. FC0105 super smooth on the bottom, the best summer jeans I’ve found.

nyuk-nyuk: yes to the daicock @cheapmuthafukr!!! yes yes yes 4verar to @Graytrain cool collections... and for discussions on authenticity; evis/u made/make great jeans but it must be remembered that yamane-san is true/supreme hype man as much as crafts-man... and yes, as per the thread; I still pledge allegiance: I still love evisu very very much!

Diacock is still loved

I wouldn't say the handsewn is inherently higher quality. The resulting look is slightly different. I have a pair of Alden shell tassel loafers (from shoe mart factory seconds, with possibly fewer imperfections than my first quality models -- that's a tale for another time), and I like the machine stitch on the apron. It's a bit "neater" and that makes it a bit dressier than the handsewn, which works for what I wear them for. Of course, if you are going for something more casual, then that won't be an issue. I think there is a place for both.

Phigvel made a moccasin

Good point Julian, hadn't considered applying those. Another point I should've mentioned is that I've also been considering the JM Weston 180 loafer in beechnut suede. The JM Weston seem a bit more dressy and my style is more casual, but I saw some in person in Paris and they were really well made.

Your perception is the only truth. It is what informs your experience, and shapes tomorrow's truth in the light of new perception. Magic and meaning is everywhere, in everything, but it is entirely unique to the observer. We (as a collective humanity) often put to much external value on that truth, particularly when a collection of individuals experience the same truth, and thus try to enforce it upon others as a universal truth to shape their perception. Please forgive the philosophy, feel free to ignore it as well. Its my perception anyways, which doesn't mean its true.

To offer somewhat of a different perspective here that has little to do with old repros per se, nostalgia is a powerful drug. The search for “authenticity” is often a search for feelings one had as a youth, when everything was more exciting because one was young and because there is a sense of discovery at that age that there won’t be when you’ve lived longer, and seen more. It’s not to say that the pursuit of nostalgia is problematic, but one will simply never recreate the feelings of that age. It is a chapter in life. Now we are in a new chapter. There are plenty of brands here that I would contend exude the passion some probably found in the original Osaka 5 works. And maybe young people finding them today will have the same feelings about them twenty years from now. Tender, Freewheelers, and Ooe, (and TCB as noted) for example - all know how to do IG , yes, but they also clearly and patently make what they love and it shows in the clothes - those of us that have them probably appreciate them largely for this reason. There are things from the past worth holding on to, but we can’t completely. I also don’t mean to take anything away from collecting older models - if that’s your jam, by all means. It’s fun to go searching and find a treasure, absolutely. It just doesn’t mean that there isn’t something out right now that lacks that same magic. These are just perceptions. I use Leica digital Monochromes for my work. I use them because damn are the files so much better than a 35mm negative, and they make pictures possible that weren’t before. I’m stubborn and want the camera to feel like the sort I used for years, but that’s the irrational part of me. They are an objective improvement compared to the negatives you’d get from tri-x run through an analog M, and the prints (that I do digitally) have their own unique and beautiful presence that a silver print differs from (not better or worse). But, I came up shooting film for a good while, I shot it for work when I had the budget, had to turn around that shit on deadline for magazines stubbornly when digital was in full force already because 10 years ago medium format film still had a very demonstrable advantage - as of about the 36 and 40 mp sensors in the D800 series or the Sony A7R series, it was gone. And I was happy to let it go. I still have my Rolleiflexes and M6, beautiful mechanical objects but they sit in a case because as photographic tools they’re not as good for most purposes. (Some specific purposes - I’ll never tell someone what they need - I’m sure can be found). If one enjoys the process more, that’s great. Enjoying the process is the most important part of making things, most of the time. But careful not to hold an idea that it’s somehow something more real or pure because it’s older or slower etc. And there’s nothing that stops one from being deliberate on a digital camera. I get that the roll of film presents a hard limit on things, but there’s nothing stopping one from just shooting a few deliberately made pictures even if you can make 1000. Yes, we are awash in more plastic and more fakery and more advertising than ever, and it can make the good stuff hard to find, but it’s more out there than ever. Maybe this is because I work in the arts but there is great new work being made now, all of the time, and the idea of “the good old days” is a mirage that will never materialize because the way it exists in one’s head now is different than it was even then. Realizing this probably belongs in the “nonsense” thread - mods feel free to move, or delete even if this is too insufferable ha.

Some of the conversation here feels in the spirit of some of the philosophical thoughts (both clothing/style and otherwise) that I've been thinking about during late nights with my son. Here is my screed. There are all sorts of different reasons that lead people to choose the items that they wear. They may dress a certain way due to economics, aesthetics, to generate "likes", to blend in, to stand out, to convey affinity or membership in a particular subculture, because they just enjoy wearing particular items for the sake of it, etc. Obviously, these reasons are not all mutually exclusive. In the image and click based world of today, arguably certain reasons are privileged more than others. In an Instagram fit pic, a pair of vintage Evis Lot 2501 No. 1 (as an example pertinent to this thread) will be more or less indistinguishable from a pair of modern day Levis or mall brand jeans and would generate no more likes or hype, as opposed to say the Oni Asphalt fabric. In the real world though, their is an intangible element to those Evis that can only be experienced through love and wear - the tactile experience of the fabric, the history, the passion, dedication, and craftsmanship of the creator. This goes beyond clothing as well, at least it does for me. It's similar to the reason why I collect vintage pulp hardboiled and sci-fi paperbacks rather than the modern day reissues of those titles. I just love the vintage Robert McGinnis cover art as opposed to the more soulless covers of today. It's the reason why I'm going to start getting into film photography (at least occasionally) with an old Nikon SLR and an old Leica rangefinder. Sure I can probably create more technically perfect images with my Fuji mirrorless camera and Lightroom, but then I lose some of the tactile joy and craft of the analog experience. Rather than spamming 100s of shots for the perfect image, I have to be much more deliberate in my choices. Even in my professional area of science (chemistry,chemical engineering/soft matter physics), there was a sense of discovery, wonder, and careful details present in older literature than in contemporary literature. These older works often did science for the sake of fundamental discovery and carefully crafted experiments and shared the results in a more sober matter-of-fact manner. I never learned as much as I did from literature from the mid-90s and earlier. Today, as in denim, a lot of the work fixates more on the final product than the journey. Large portions of academic research focus more on device fabrication and subsequent commodification in search of an easy start-up spinoff or payday at the expense of fundamental research. I don't blame them since such hype generation drives a lot of the funding decisions, at least in the US, but this reality is ultimately what led me away from academic roles/professorships and is partly why I'm now an industrial scientist. To conclude and as a slight aside, some of the discussion here is ultimately what led me to purchase the TCB no. 2. The jeans are clearly polarizing in aesthetic as evidence by the contest thread here. They were most definitely not designed to generate 100 fit pic posts on Reddit. Rather, they exist because Inoue-san clearly loves the history of the denim and cared deeply about maklng those jeans for their own sake. Are they a pair that I would pick in a vacuum - no. However, I too appreciate the attention to detail and wanted to do my smallest part to ensure that the passion and craft can live on a little longer

And the fit, paired with the early Evis 2501xx with arcs

The community of people that care about repros will continue to dwindle to the point where there won't be a big enough market to justify making the clothing. And with it will die the entire story of how it all came to be. It's a bit heart breaking really. I hope someone is or will document the history of the Osaka 5 and the rise of Japanese denim. As for the stuff we get nowadays and why I'm less interested. I feel as though with social media came a feedback mechanism that took a bit of personality out of the garments. They feel "made for someone" instead of made for their own appreciation. In many ways this is amazing. We get items that couldn't exist before and justified a market for very niche products. But before that, the world was smaller. The older repros might not have CSF-level attention to detail, but they have a spirit to them that speaks of individuals making something for themselves without caring to make others happy. It's feels pure and true. They come imbued with something that makes them different than a blank canvas. And to me, wearing *that* feels worlds different than wearing a new release.

Merz - Duke - Denime - Cons

german surplus flecktarn gore tex ish, filson, post o’alls, tender, timbos (matching with @Geeman), with mini-phonics in baby levis tux; type 3 and late 90s stf 501: check my janky sashiko…

Wow!

Here’s the reference bag … which does not use CF Stead Repello nor is it hand made https://www.printemps.com/uk/en/jerome-dreyfuss-leon-m-leather-tote-bag-brown-women-7940848?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwgdayBhBQEiwAXhMxtucbjs_OYUh4kzfIGz66uYddb4ds7n0KZXLqWSpXhHxQJtnRsDvaohoCEGQQAvD_BwE#5083802

This is by far the thickest belt I’ve decorated - J&FJ Baker oak tanned bridle @ nearly 15oz, with ultra heavy solid brass buckle, brass hardware, cobra overlays, onyx and tiger eye gemstones, and antique Japanese coin