@MJF9 these 129s are my third pair of tenders; i started with a pair of 132s that i wore alongside my sugar canes when I lived in Ecuador. They were great for being up in the mountains, hiking, doing construction, and looked sharp in the city, especially alongside the irregular and extravagant denim styles popular in a lot of Latin America, but at the time I had closer to a 28” waist and they were just way too big. After a year of somewhat frequent wear they’d hardly faded and I ended up giving them to a friend who’s a motorcycle mechanic in eastern Oregon. Last I’d seen, they were all thrashed and patched up, he loved them. So, anecdotal point 1 was those 132s fading extremely stubbornly. The earlier comparison made to SDA denim feels apt, I’d say, given how those are known to fade very slowly.
My second pair were the 128s, those are the ones with square patch pockets on the front and back, and no yoke, hence a very short rise. I wore those about 6 months before deciding they were just too low-rise for me to wear comfortably. I ended up cannibalizing them to make a weird pair of overalls that never fully got there, lol… not sure what I was thinking really, but anyway, they live on in my scrap pile so you can see a comparison with the 129s below.
Lastly came the 129s, and I’m really not sure how much wear I’ve put into them, but probably close to or slightly over 2 years. They’ve been put through a lot; I wore them from 2018 thru the first half of 2020 while working in an auto garage and at a powder coating factory, alongside tattooing, so they got put through the ringer daily and were washed at least once every couple weeks. Despite that regimen, they have held up beautifully, besides the aforementioned stitching issues, and the fabric is just something else. Heavy washing does it a lot of good; the texture this pair achieved is hands down my favourite of any pair I’ve owned in 10+ years of being into this hobby. Anyway, here are some quick comparison pics of the 128s and 129s:
