Cold Summer

I too have been wearing my jeans unhemmed for the past few months and I really don't think I'm going back. Not having to clean out my cuffs or deal with damage to the fabric/expensive repairs is nice, besides the fact I'm just more comfortable with the look now.

r/rawdenim has been a trainwreck for years, it's great if you're an overly-sensitive Millennial who's had an IV drip of corporatized Internet from infancy onward and loves endless fit pics of dudes with hairy muffin tops. But anybody older than that who grew up with forum communities like this where a body of useful knowledge could be accumulated and easily referenced understands just how vapid and useless the platform is. Something about Reddit seems to attract and empower the absolute most useless passive-aggressive goobers, which leads to things like rawdenim's silly moderation. Superdenim could be comically hostile ~15 years ago, but at least it's an actual community collecting useful reference for the hobby.

In recent years, I've switched to buying mostly stuff from Japanese sites like Mercari or Yahoo Auctions, getting some great deals on lightly-used things, plus the occasional new purchase from Japan. The very favorable USD to JPY exchange rate has also helped. Anyway, at this point I feel like my wardrobe is pretty much complete and I'm not likely to make more than occasional purchases for quite some time. My days of paying full USD retail price for a flannel shirt made in Japan are pretty much over.

Nice fit! The well aged TFH plate buckle belt is a nice touch too. I'm sure we'll see some great evo from this denim. I'll post an update soon on my older pair of 3005s which is well past 1.5 years of wear, and probably my most worn jeans at this point.

I didn't feel like the S3000vx had noticeably smaller pockets than lots of other pairs I've owned. Though I do prefer big front pockets since I have large hands, it's nice to have somewhere to put them. Nice thing about a contest like this, you can make sure the maker builds the jeans with reasonably-sized pockets! I carry a pretty compact phone (iPhone SE), but I've found the best solution to pocket space, avoiding ugly fades, and general convenience is to just keep my phone and other EDC in a bag when I'm out and about.

Same, I have painted arcs on my Samurai S3000vx and Flat Head 3003xx and love how they look. The 3003xx also has the olive herringbone pocketbags, I know this is a common detail on WWII repro jeans but this is probably my favorite pocket material, period.

Sounds cool Kiya, I'll keep an eye out. The roughout deerskin on the above boots is pretty cool, but it probably doesn't look or age much differently from cowhide.

A TFH item I'd love to find someday is a pair of SKB-30D boots in my size (10/28.0cm). It's a roughout deerskin engineer boot, when I worked there a lot of guys had these and they looked great. Unfortunately it's been a long time since they've made those and I doubt they're coming back. If any of you happen to see a pair for sale in my size, do let me know.

In a way I'm thankful for this Niko fellow, because whatever relative weirdness I do in regards to my denim hobby seems totally benign in comparison to his antics.

I've been burned on UES sizing proportions too many times to be particularly inclined to try them again. But Deluxeware looks great, I forgot all about them but they have some nice looking thermals with measurements that seem good to me, and a nice price too. Great suggestion!

I'm looking to add a few thermal tees for fall/winter layering. They should be long sleeve, all cotton, medium weight, have decently long sleeves for my long arms, and not absurdly expensive. I tried on an Iron Heart thermal at my local retailer at the start of the year and liked it a lot, but it was maybe a bit bulkier than I wanted, and I balked at the price tag. It doesn't need to be by a premium/made-in-Japan brand even, but I would like something all cotton with no synthetic fibers, which likely rules out cheaper options like Uniqlo.

It's Samurai trying to "protect" overseas retailers from being undercut by buying from Japan for far less than the crazy markups. We've seen this kind of thing happen before, notable with Pure Blue Japan a few years ago where they dumped retailers like Okayama Denim and Denimio, probably due to protests from overseas specialty shops. But I've never heard of any brand just not allowing any Japanese retailers to list on Rakuten at all, it's hard to imagine they could actually enforce that since it'd undercut domestic sales for stores to have no online listings at all for a brand like Samurai. That's putting out a fire by bombing the whole building. The postscript saying to email them if you can't find a product on their site you're looking for, wink and a nod, suggests that they want you to just contact them directly and you'll still be able to buy that way. Warning: rant/spicy commentary incoming! I kind of understand both sides on this issue, but since personally I'm mostly buying deadstock or used clothes off Japanese sites like Yahoo Auctions or Mercari for a fraction of the price of comparable new items from an American retailer, I don't really care at this point. At this stage in life I'm unable, or at least unwilling, to summon the cash to pay the bonkers US retailer prices of new items by Japanese heritage brands, so I try to make my buck go as far as it can buying straight from Japanese secondhand sites. Some things, like sweatshirts or tees, I absolutely prefer to buy in person and don't mind a little markup in exchange for knowing I like the fit and fabric. But with jeans, it's easy for me to buy sight unseen and know what I'm getting if measurements are posted. As an added bonus you often find older versions of jeans, etc. with discontinued features like arcs and tabs on auction sites, which in the case of brands like Samurai is nice since the "old" versions are more distinct than the watered-down, more export-oriented design. Lots of other brands (like Full Count) have done this over the past few years and it always seems to correlate with a dilution of the brand's identity as well as hiked-up prices where you pay more cash for a more generic jean. Back in the day brands like Flat Head and Iron Heart responded to the Levi's lawsuit by revamping their products to have a more unique, less Levis-ripoff-y identity, but in recent years the trend seems to be just eliminating anything that makes a brand stand out from other plain featureless repro jeans.

Looking good, I like that 47 fit a lot.

I don't think that would be bad, as long as variation was pretty much limited to fit. For instance, a straight leg model, and a more relaxed straight leg model for thicker folks. But you'd want the details, denim, and so on to be the same. Very true. The problem is that since the mid-late 2000s SuFu heyday, internet forums as a basis for hobby communities have basically died, and it's relatively old-timers (generally born in the 1980s or earlier), whose formative Internet experience predates the 2005-2009 social media boom, who continue to use them. I think this is a real shame as forum-based communities make it far easier to build a useful reference base of knowledge and continuity than their vastly-inferior corporate replacements such as Reddit and Discord, which emphasize flash-in-the-pan novelty and convenience over substance.

That makes sense. Having spent little time on motorcycles myself, that didn't occur to me. Am I the only one who's become rather disillusioned with the whole concept of denim contests? I like the updates from SuFu posters in the Indigo Invitational contest. But the way these contests have gone for the last ten years or so, they increasingly feel like a cartoonish caricature encouraging the worst aspects of denim enthusiast culture, which I'm increasingly uninterested in perpetuating. I've had the idea of saving this pair or that for a future contest but I feel like I'm not even going to bother, and just wear whenever I feel like it. I'm pretty disciplined about focusing on one pair at a time so I don't need a contest to help me actually fade something, which seems to be a common motivation. And I've already got all the cool clothing I'll ever need so prizes don't matter much to me. The problem is that the contest itself seems to motivate and incentivize weird behavior from entrants in an attempt to win, rather than just wearing the denim naturally and seeing how it turns out. On top of that, the free-for-all of different brands, fits, denim weights, and so on makes it hard to have any objective comparison or evaluation. The most interesting contests I've seen were those where everybody wore the same model of jeans, like the SuFu Samurai contest from back in the day.

Did he starch his jacket, roll around in the mud, then hike the hem up to his armpits to make it scrunch up like that? I don't even understand what I'm looking at here, other than that his jacket looks really dirty and gross. I like high-contrast fades and often go long periods without washing my denim stuff, depending on the garment and season, but it never comes at the expense of basic dignity. If my jeans, jacket, etc. starts to look, feel, or smell dirty, I just wash it. There's plenty of room for individual expressiveness between the extremes of washing your jeans every time you wear them, and never washing even when they look obviously disgusting. It's one thing if this guy throws on his denim jacket to go to his 9-5 job working on a construction site... but I really doubt that's it.

Those look good. Inseam is really short, which is fine by me since I already have three discontinued deadstock TFH pairs waiting to be worn someday.

I’ve started wearing a small shoulder bag to keep my keys/phone/wallet/other EDC like the gentlemen of Japan do, so I was looking out for a simple, slim long wallet to replace my beefier denim nerd ones. I found this Porter Yoshida one used on Mercari for very cheap, and it’s just what I was looking for. Nice Italian veg tan leather with a lovely patina, neat sewing, made in Japan. Plenty of space for my stuff, but slim enough that I could keep it in a jacket breast pocket if I opt to leave the bag behind.

Nice work so far guys. I sat out this round to focus on some in-progress pairs, but I'll probably enter the next denim contest with my deadstock TFH 1005s.

I'm curious what changes happened with their Pioneer denim, I've owned a couple TFH things since they went bankrupt/reorganized, but the jeans, denim jackets, etc. I've bought were dead stock from auctions and such. I've looked at pictures on retailer sites of current models like the 3005 or 3009 and the denim looks the same as it always has, but I know pictures don't always tell the whole story.

This is the first time I've ever seen Eternal with a working website. Buckle back jeans look kinda cool.

Nice, I'm excited to see the new TFH gear. This summer I've been wearing my 3005s I got from Self Edge back in 2018, they're still going strong at around 1.5 years of real wear. Bummer about the 1001xx situation, but I can just repair mine and keep wearing, so it's not the end of the world.

Kiya, any idea if/when you'll restock the Warehouse 1001xx? I've worn tons and tons of jeans over the years and my 1001xx I got about three years ago is so close to being my absolute favorite pair, from the denim to fit to details, these are just the perfect vintage-style jean for me. My pair needs some repairs but they ought to have a ton of life left after that. Regardless, this is a jean I like so much that I'd just automatically buy them again if I could, but they've been sold out forever and only you guys sell a version long enough for me.

Finally got some pics of my BR chinos.

I got a new old car recently and I am loving it. Very low mileage, in excellent condition. 1996 Oldsmobile Ciera wagon.