Denim Blunders, Reflections and General Nonsense.

[Ciabatta]

My guy Yoshinobu Yamamoto pulling up to pitch game 3 dripped out in the denim tux. 

[Broark]

9 minutes ago, Ciabatta said:

My guy Yoshinobu Yamamoto pulling up to pitch game 3 dripped out in the denim tux. 

I’m guessing this might be a CSF jacket, I saw that Konaka reposted another post of him wearing the jacket on IG.
I can’t stand the Dodgers (go Braves, still sad that Freddie left but no bad blood there) but this is kinda cool to see .

[Double 0 Soul]

I was always more of a Rounders guy.. I'd play first base, Steven Green would be back stop.. Mr Ellerby would be the bowler..

Pfft! .. the other team didn't stand a chance!

6 hours ago, CSL said:

It says 2019 but the photos are from a ways further back, yes?

'What the hell are you wearing' started in 2012 .. in 2019 Hollows made the Quarterly which i believe was all the sexiest folks from 'what the hell' or maybe it could have been a compilation of all the posts with 12 or more +reps.. akin to sufu's 20+ .. Na, sexiest, surely?

Anywhoo.. there was 1200 pages to go through and he either ran out of steam or the forum imploded before he had a chance to finish it so it was only ever 2 pages long.

Edited October 9, 2025 by Double 0 Soul

[MJF9]

@indigoeagle The Denimbro link doesn't work for me 

[Double 0 Soul]

Nothing at all @MJF9

The imgur header is dead (for UK folks) and the rest of the page takes a while to load up because it's just a bunch of images but if you leave it for 10 seconds and scroll down...?

[indigoeagle]

2 hours ago, MJF9 said:

@indigoeagle The Denimbro link doesn't work for me 

Still not? Like 00 said you have to wait a bit for the pics to load.
I just tried it again and it works here.

[Dr_Heech]

3 hours ago, Double 0 Soul said:

'What the hell are you wearing' started in 2012 .. in 2019 Hollows made the Quarterly which i believe was all the sexiest folks from 'what the hell' or maybe it could have been a compilation of all the posts with 12 or more +reps.. akin to sufu's 20+ .. Na, sexiest, surely?

Anywhoo.. there was 1200 pages to go through and he either ran out of steam or the forum imploded before he had a chance to finish it so it was only ever 2 pages long.

I think l was in it once. 

Bloody denim snobs 😆

[ATWM]

That was a fun peruse. I think it’s good I found this spot though, as opposed to DB. 

[Broark]

4 minutes ago, ATWM said:

I think it’s good I found this spot though, as opposed to DB. 

To me it always kinda felt like you had to be a part of the inner circle / original member group there to really interact.

[Double 0 Soul]

Well, it never stopped me? .. Oh! You mean ‘interact positively’ 

I was almost banned from DB on a weekly basis.. whether I was telling the Mister Freedom fanboys they all looked like shop mannequins.. parodying the denim hunters, telling folks their $1000 shirt didn’t fit properly, instigating arguments with all and sundry (usually Ishmael because he was so grumpy and easy to provoke) or using the music thread for forum commentary.. 

hollows or mr.r had to give me a jolly good talking to every couple of weeks . 

[ATWM]

52 minutes ago, Broark said:

To me it always kinda felt like you had to be a part of the inner circle / original member group there to really interact.

I’m just not sure my aversion of smoking pipes and twirled end mustaches would have been good for me there. 

[Broark]

Looking back at it now it’s certainly a bit of a time capsule of the early to mid aughts rise in the train conductor / coal miner look.
Kind of a niche subsection of the more popular “rugged” trend around the same time. Fun to look back at!

[Double 0 Soul]

Part of the problem was.. folks took themselves way too seriously (which probably comes across in some of the fit pics)  whereas I always thought.. we’re a bunch of middle aged denim nerds spending way too much money on clothing then posting it on the interwebz for the approval of others. Not the kind of behaviour we should be taking all too seriously.. so if I was poking fun at them (as I often did) they’d get really offended and come out guns a’blazin.. 

Whereas here.. I can give @Broark some shit for buying $600 ROs and he takes it with good humour because he knows it’s ridiculous.. as is most of the stuff i / we all buy.. 

Oh no! .. this almost perfect repro has a stitch in the wrong position, pfft! I’m not buying that..

it’s absolutely ridiculous and worth poking fun at but I still love it nonetheless.. 🥰 

[Broark]

Well said 00, these days there’s too much other stupid shit going on in the world to get upset over a niche clothing forum.

And I’ll defend the RO sneaks to my grave. 

[ATWM]

^ yes.

I love pants.

I also have a hard time saying "I love pants" to my friends with a straight face. And rightly so. Part of the reason I never much understood the instagram denim scene with those costumed out dudes actually trying to cultivate a following ... it's just all serious vibes and like....at least from where I sit...full on attempts to place oneself in a fictional idealized past. Fine so far as it goes, but just a totally alienating and uninteresting notion to me personally. Also, from an aesthetic perspective, trends uncomfortably close to some weird (to me) politics a little too often.  I don't know, maybe when I was on it the algorithm just served me op the most preposterous of the bunch, but there was plenty! Lol. 

My local skate shop used to carry stickers that said "fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" - being super serious and hard about pants is something like that, for me. My wife has actually sort of come around to this hobby because she finds it sort of cute and innocent and silly (which I would agree) given some alternatives - that is as long as I'm getting enough work ha. Plus she's gotten a few cozy sweatshirts out of it that are better than anything she knew before. 

That said, the world needs a few cranks with opinions about things to hold up a mirror to absurdity, so I'm sure your presence ultimately lifted all boats there @Double 0 Soul

I suppose if I'd spent $600 on some sneaks I'd have to take a hard line on how awesome they are too 😃 ... I hope to never know! 

Edited October 9, 2025 by ATWM

[Double 0 Soul]

He only bought them because they were sold at Self Edge.. if they were sold at Mall-Ninjas’r Us he wouldn’t have bothered 

[Broark]

16 minutes ago, Double 0 Soul said:

He only bought them because they were sold at Self Edge

To be fair, I only saw them in person because they were being sold at SE.
I never would've considered them if I hadn't seen them and gotten to try them on beforehand.

[MJF9]

@indigoeagle @Double 0 Soul got it... with a little patience... some solid fits there from a number of Sufu OGs there  

@Double 0 Soul was that first pic just before your draft into the US military?

[MJF9]

Young guns inspired by Sufu?!  I don't know this fella but assume he's famous as he popped up on a feed

 

[Double 0 Soul]

 

9 minutes ago, MJF9 said:

@indigoeagle @Double 0 Soul got it... with a little patience... some solid fits there from a number of Sufu OGs there  

@Double 0 Soul was that first pic just before your draft into the US military?

I was wearing a US Navy watch cap and a US Airforce flying jacket.. if you knew your denim cosplay, you’d know I was actually going for a 1940s aircraft carrier larp 

[MJF9]

haha military indeed Neal - yes Sir!!

[CSL]

I think that snapshot of Denimbro perhaps comes off as more pretentious than it actually was.
We see the pics of Corey, a professional photographer with understandably high production values. I think most or all of us dug what he was doing. I certainly did. I really liked seeing high quality artistic pics of those guys exploring abandoned mines and such.

I went to one of the Denimbruin get-togethers. Nice bunch of folks who were all very tolerant of my particular cocktail of social anxiety...

It was sad to see things go south with the LeRoys scandal, the mass deletion, etc.

 

[Double 0 Soul]

Pretentious.. surely not?

They would go out "denim-hunting" all dressed in period correct 1890s era clothing to go down an 1890s era mine.. they took vintage c1890s era candles which they used to drip candle wax down themselves for effect.. they affected their faces and clothing with period correct dirt, then stood in a line outside the mine to have their photos taken in extreme HDR with extra HDR added in editing..

How did they get to these mines one might ask.. maybe hot air balloon or steam train.. no they went on dirt bikes? they had dirt bikes and 1000s of pounds worth of camera equipment but they didn't have any torches

[Double 0 Soul]

A lot of this nonsense was the precurser to all the instagram fakery we see today.

I'mean we have pro photographers here but thankfully fit pics remain a snapshot of what one is wearing rather than an advert for ones editing skills.

[Broark]

20 minutes ago, Double 0 Soul said:

extreme HDR with extra HDR added in editing..

This bothered me then and it still bothers me today.

[ATWM]

Oh man, if I can get into a discussion about photography and denim I will never leave!

I'll confess, while I didn't know this forum then, I was vaguely aware of the sort of approach described above. I was actually commissioned to shoot (and I would say, failed miserably at) some things that would suit this vibe for really nice thick papered matte finished magazines that paid extortionately low rates and folded after a few issues - I was given briefs of some of this stuff - possibly even inspired by DB who knows. At any rate, I can appreciate the skill and design in such shoots, I couldn't do it - I even tried. The whole thing, even while I was there, I just couldn't buy in. Just wasn't an alignment of my skills and interests. Not trying to throw shade really, just to say - that's the side of things that never clicked for me with this interest. 

This is because, I guess, at heart, I am a documentary photographer. I love some of the vintage photos posted in that thread, for example. Far cry from influencer content in similar garb.

I like fiction as much as the next person (in my novels), but conjuring that up with pictures has never been my forte or interest for the most part.

As an aside - and this is just me - the day I shoot my WAYWT with anything other than my foggy lensed, cracked screen 6 yr old iphone at an unflattering angle because that's where the stoop I can rest it is on, is the day I've taken this too seriously. 

[smoothsailor]

10 hours ago, Double 0 Soul said:

Well, it never stopped me? .. Oh! You mean ‘interact positively’ 

I was almost banned from DB on a weekly basis.. whether I was telling the Mister Freedom fanboys they all looked like shop mannequins.. parodying the denim hunters, telling folks their $1000 shirt didn’t fit properly, instigating arguments with all and sundry (usually Ishmael because he was so grumpy and easy to provoke) or using the music thread for forum commentary.. 

hollows or mr.r had to give me a jolly good talking to every couple of weeks . 

Some hours well spend in those days, reading all the beef

[smoothsailor]

11 hours ago, Broark said:

To me it always kinda felt like you had to be a part of the inner circle / original member group there to really interact.

It could have been that way a bit. I had a few deafening silence after cracking a joke. I thought I read in enough to understand it a bit.

but I hung on

[Double 0 Soul]

I once bought a pair of regular Levi's from the vintage shop.. wrote '1879 XX' on the patch in biro then burried them in a slag heap in the woods near where we lived..

Then i created this contrived scenario where i used elastic bands to wrap patches of vintage Wrangler denim around 2x bent rods then posted a series of photos where i went out in the woods, using 'denim dowsing rods' to locate vintage denim burried under the ground as a piss-take of the denim-hunter vibe.

edit- here we go.. i've found it

https://www.denimbro.com/post-something-here-anything-at-all_topic29_page20.html?KW=dowsing

Happy Days!

Edited October 9, 2025 by Double 0 Soul

[CSL]

And yet I don't remember anyone, on Denimbro at least, ever calling out Corey for being pretentious. (btw he told me his photos were not HDR).

Perhaps I should have said 'insincere' rather than 'pretentious'.

As someone who has built a life around playing vintage musical styles, plus trying to conjure the ethos of the eras those styles came out, of I suppose I'm sympathetic to a degree of pretense if the goal is sincere.

 

Edited October 10, 2025 by CSL