Cold Summer

Great article, lots of interesting points raised. I'm a pragmatic guy, if there's a shirt or something I've been eyeing and want to get anyway, and there's a sale for Labor Day or Black Friday or whatever, then I might pull the trigger on it. But rarely if ever do "sales" make me want something I didn't previously just because it's cheap. I hate that kind of artificially contrived demand. I'd rather pay full price for something I really like than get a deal on something I don't. Something I like about buying things from the kinds of specialty shops that sell the stuff we like around here is that it feels outside the mainstream consumerism infrastructure. I don't watch TV, I don't know what music or movies or whatever are "popular," what clothes are "stylish" or "on trend," pretty much everything I "consume" and involve myself in, is far beyond the city limits of what constitutes mainstream "consumerism." So keeping-up-with-the-Joneses "sales" feel like a concession to the typical normie consumer treadmill, now that I think about it. This is the operative quote for me: This really resonates with me, I've had more "fun" hunting for personal grail Flat Head shirts and such on Japanese sites over the past couple years than anything else, and I've gotten great deals in the process. It's much more thrilling to me to get a great looking flannel made fifteen years ago, than most new stuff coming out. And I've gotten some great deals on these things too. Specialty secondhand is one segment of this whole thing that gives me some hope, I guess, and feels like a mode of operation outside our usual dichotomy where you're a Marxist who wants to tear down The System or a Capitalist who loves them big corporations. It's like a throwback to an older, pre-industrial, more honest sort of commerce. Good retail stores manage to preserve some of that vibe, I think. S&S sold out a new $340 Ooe release today in about five minutes, from a pragmatic standpoint it's easy to see, "Pfft, these guys suck at business, they should be selling these jeans for $550, supply and demand bro!" It takes some integrity to say, this is an awesome product and we want to offer it at a fair price and not just shake you down for as much as humanly possible. But at the end of the day I'm not making a huge sacrifice paying full retail, if I want/need to. I'm buying jeans and shirts, not a Rolex. The cost of the clothing items I'm into is a lot more than buying a shirt from H&M, but not really that much of a sacrifice, especially considering I'll resell things I don't like as much over time and get some of that money back. I feel like I get a lot more out of it than I'm putting into it, even at full price.

RRL Heavy Flannel Freenote Cloth RJ-1 Jacket Flat Head 3005 @ five months of wear Wesco Mister Lou Horsehide

I'm giving more thought to the idea of entering with my TFH 1005s. Haven't decided yet for sure, but the prizes seem mighty nice. How exactly are the prizes handed out, anyway? I couldn't find anything about it on the site. Isn't it like, the grand prize winner chooses five, then the runner up chooses two, third place one, then it runs down the finalists in order, or something like that? Seems odd to me that the site doesn't explain this more clearly (or at all.)

Beanie knit by a friend as a Christmas present a few years ago 3Sixteen green crosscut shirt Denime by Warehouse pullover hoodie Warehouse/Rocky Mountain Featherbed down vest Flat Head 3005 Wesco 7500

The western shirts do tend to be very slim, but the "work" style shirts, less so. TFH westerns taper from the armpits to the hem, but the work-style shirts dont. I'm tall and slim so I like that kind of tapered shirt, though I also have some boxier fitting TFH shirts I enjoy. If that's your issue with Flat Head, go Sugar Cane/Toyo instead. They make great stuff, often resell for cheap on Japanese sites, and would fit more to your liking. I have the inverse issue with Toyo stuff, to get long enough sleeves, I'd have to size up so much that I'd look like I was wearing a fancy potato sack.

Real McCoys A-2 Flat Head hickory stripe shirt Hollows Rail belt Flat Head 3005, 5 months wear John Lofgren Steadfast boots

Flat Head snow pattern sweatshirt Flat Head red herringbone flannel Iron Heart belt Flat Head hickory stripe pants Wesco Mister Lou horsehide boots TFH gear was all from Yahoo Auctions and Mercari! A rare no-denim outfit from me. I'm particularly excited about the pants, love the fit and everything else about these, for just half or a third of the cost of similar pants at most specialty shops.

Yep. And a nice flannel or cozy sweatshirt is accessible in a way that a super crunchy pair of pants you have to shrink to fit and hope it fits good, then wear every day and maybe not wash for a long time... kinda isn't. As much as I love TFH's denim, I feel it's really their shirts where they shine brighter than pretty much anybody else. Proprietary selvedge fabrics in countless awesome patterns, all-cotton stitching, lots of narrow double stitch and single-stitched parts, terrific buttons and hardware: it's all there.

Killer haul! In addition to goodies for myself, I got shirts or sweats for my wife, dad, brothers, and their wives. It’s gonna be the best pile of Christmas presents I’ve ever given.

Here's something that's maybe been discussed before, but a topic of interest to me: how has your style changed since you discovered denim nerdery? I got into all this back in late 2009 when I found out about Nudie. At the time I was clearly in the hipster aesthetic, wearing the skinniest possible jeans and buying most of my clothes from places like Urban Outfitters or American Apparel. For the first few years I just sort of integrated raw denim into this preexisting style. Maybe around 2012 or so, when I'd been in Japan about a year, I started to warm up to how Japanese fans wore this kind of stuff, in a more relaxed style than mine, but I was still a devotee of the very slim fits until the mid 2010s. Around then I started to experiment with slightly more heritage elements, getting engineer boots and sometimes shopping at places like RRL. I had a weird phase in 2016-17 where I got really into the Hedi Slimane look and went back to really skinny jeans, I was still wearing some denim nerd brands like 3Sixteen but had a lot of stuff with that fake rockstar aesthetic... I really cringe looking back on that now, especially considering that I was in my late 20s when that went down. I shook that off in 2018 as I started drawing more inspiration from things like LVC lookbooks, wanting a return to a more "heritage" aesthetic and vintage clothing. When I got my Flat Head 3005s and started tucking in my tees in fall 2018, that was when I pretty much reached my present style, trying to combine amekaji the way that Japanese fans wear it, with a more general pre-1990s American alternative dork aesthetic/"extra from an arcade scene in a movie set in the 80s" style in the summer, and "failed mid-century ranch hand and/or villainous extra from Justified" in the cooler months; and my style really hasn't changed at all since then.

I've had some tremendous finds on Japanese auction and thrift sites, capturing several of my all-time grail Flat Head items recently (most of them at cheapo prices): flannel shirts, western shirts, even a deadstock pair of pin hickory pants; the first of two boxes is on its way, and I'm excited to share. Finding flannels and other items from TFH's heyday, in my size, for low prices, is about as excited as I've ever been about denim-related nerdery.

Excited to see how some Sufu competitors do. I have a fresh pair of Flat Head 1005s that I could use, but most likely these will stay stashed in the closet for a few years. Perhaps I'll bust them out for a future contest. One of the most important things to this kind of competition is to pick a pair of jeans that will work well for year-round wear, and with all sorts of outfits you wear. Last round of this contest I tried the Samurai S3000vx for a few months; great jeans I'll wear more in the future, but between the heavy, crunchy denim and low-ish rise (on me), they're really best suited to wearing in colder weather with untucked shirts.