Cold Summer

Personally, I would take a principled death in my wagon than ignobly survive an accident in a giant SUV. Besides, making stratospheric monthly payments on the big SUV would just make me wish I was dead anyway! @Double 0 Soul Back when I lived in northern Japan in 2011-12, I drive a Suzuki kei car, a front wheel drive box that probably produced less horsepower than a ride-on lawnmower, and I literally drove the thing on solid ice roads for about six months a year with virtually no issues at all, my town was literally buried in snow constantly and I never had any problem getting around in that tiny car or thought what I really needed was a big truck. The truck/SUV crazy in the US is rooted in pure crony capitalism. Government regulation loopholes incentivized auto makers to build big trucks and SUVs because they're subject to less strict standards than smaller cars since they're categorized as "light trucks," which was intended to apply to commercial work vehicles; and thus, this makes them more profitable. And then, through the magical influence of advertising, American consumer taste was sculpted toward these big, profitable vehicles by selling an image of rugged toughness. Once upon a time, men aspired to own a car like a Buick or Mercury that signified you were sophisticated and classy, or a Cadillac/Lincoln if you really wanted to exude rich man vibes. Today, it's all about projecting the image that you're the most braggadocios asshole possible. What's funny is that it's all pretty superficial, my area is chock full of these angry bro-dozer trucks, but they seem like perfectly polite drivers for the most part despite the machismo, and their trucks rarely look like they've ever left the road or carried anything in their beds. I never feel unsafe driving around in my wagon in day to day life. I'm not dunking on any of y'all here who've given pretty reasonable explanations for whatever you drive in this discussion. Just sharing my observations on the general culture and all that.

Late to the car talk, but here it goes... As you'll see a couple pages back, I bought myself a a ~30 year old car earlier this year to be my personal/"fun" car. My other vehicle is a 2015 Honda CR-V. The CR-V is great for day to day family activity and convenience, and course has modern safety features, which is nice when you're transporting two kids. But when it comes to comfort and general driving experience, the Olds wagon absolutely stomps the CR-V, it's not even close. The Olds just floats down the road, it's such a smooth and pleasant car to drive, the seats are cozy velour and it's spacious inside, with a bench seat, no giant center console, and with surprisingly little cabin noise. The 3.1 L V6 has plenty of power, and combined with the four-speed automatic, offers a very satisfying drive. It's nice sounding engine too, the CR-V's engine sounds like a lawn mower in comparison. The CR-V has a much higher quality of fit and finish, and there are some materials and build aspects of the wagon that feel a bit cheap but overall it's sturdy and robust in the same way as a vintage Fender amp I used to own. I absolutely do not like the high-riding feel of SUVs and trucks at all. When I drive the CR-V, it feels harsh and twitchy, and I feel like I'm being laterally jostled around in a way that's totally absent from my wagon, and I think the center of gravity has a lot to do with it. Last weekend I went on a trip with my dad and drove his Ram pickup he got in the last two years or so. It rode pretty decently, but again, there was that annoying lateral rocking. If all you ever drive are trucks you probably don't notice it, but driving an actual car has completely spoiled me. That trip would have been more pleasant in a classic American land yacht like a Chevrolet Caprice Classic or Ford Crown Victoria, or heck, even a Toyota Avalon. If it weren't for child safety aspects I would love to only drive older, pre-2003 cars. New cars, besides being absurdly expensive and almost universally ugly, inspire distrust in various ways: the absurd volume of fragile electronics, giant screens replacing buttons and controls that can be operated by touch while driving, over-the-air "updates," poor visibility, general plasticy cheapness, and so on. Planned obsolescense has been a thing for a long time but it's a lot more glaring now, if something on my wagon breaks I'm much more confident that it can be affordably fixed or replaced than on a new car. Really the only downside to my wagon is safety, and the fuel economy is a bit lacking compared to a comparable modern car. There's something satisfying about driving around in a car with a design I actually like. Maybe it's just because I grew up in the 90s, and still hold 80s/90s cars as my base point of reference, but modern cars look so strange to me. They all have giant wheels, thin sidewall tires, absurdly tall fenders, and tiny, squat little windows with bad visibility, and comically angry expressions on their front ends, and this seems just as true of modern sedans as larger vehicles. What's puzzling to me is why everything has to be a sports car with twitchy handling, harsh suspension, and hard bucket seats, and nobody makes comfortable cars anymore. Even a friggin' Toyota Camry looks and drives like an angry sports car now. I'm not a race car driver, I'm not an angry macho man, I'm just a suburban dad with needlessly nitpicky taste in everything, and nobody makes a new car for people like me. Or at least, not one I could afford; I'm sure I'd love a Volvo V90 if somebody gave me one for free. So I'm completely happy driving an old one.

Wait, what? Didn't Full Count dump their arcs and tabs over five years ago? Did Levi's build their own time machine so they can sue temporal offenders at will?

I think I've seen these before, but I never looked into the details beyond that. Very cool looking, that fabric has a unique vibe!

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.

I've been wearing my Dawson jeans for about a month and a half now, close to a month of real wear time. I like these a lot. I wrote a post about these jeans. And I finally took some progress pics today, so I figured it was time to make an official thread for them. No washes or soaks. Because these are sanforized I'll probably go a long time before I soak or wash them - at least until the end of next summer. But the denim is very nice and I think it's going to look good with age. The creases have already set in quite nicely.