Nice Denim

[zyphon]

Does anyone know who actually designs the denim fabric? When you buy a pair of jeans from, say, Diesel, APC, or Antik, who designed the material?

Do designers generally find a fabric they like and then produce a pair of jeans based on it, or do they design the fabric within the company and have it manufactured?

Anyone have any idea?

Same goes for other things like suit fabrics.

[ringring]

The fabric mill will have generally designed the fabric. Most companies will just choose a fabric from a denim mill's collection and buy that.

If the brand is big enough to support the development of custom fabrics (ie can afford to buy the minimums), then the designers may have an influence on the fabric. Usually this will be just tweaking a fabric eg. adding some lycra, making something more or less slubby, darker, lighter, more greencast etc.

[Paul T]

Great to have you back ringring!

The denim manufacturers developed the fabric right from the early days. Levi's used to boast about Amoskeag denim - but Amoskeag was just about the biggest denim supplier there was. Many people thought that 'Jelt' was a proprietary Lee fabric, yet in fact it was a Cone invention, other manufacturers used it, but Lee advertised the Jelt name so aggressively they gained a huge competitive advantage. Gap do much the same, letting everyone believe they've pioneered left hand denim. Of course, a lot of the time Cone will develop fabrics with people like Gap in mind.

[zyphon]

Do the clothing companies at least design the wash and destruction process?

[tweeds]

They must, i mean i don't see Diesel's far-out washes anywhere else (except jeans in my local flea markets from China).

[Paul T]

The wash and destruction processes will normally be developed by laundries, who will develop the technology to make those effects. The big denim producers will have probably co-developed some of these - for instance, Martelli, who made most of the breakthrough finishes for Diesel and Replay, developed a lot of them in ocnjunction with Adriano Goldschmied of the Genius group.

What your avergae denim company will do - and someone who actually designs jeans for a living will correct me if I'm wrong - is specify the denim from a huge number of possibilities, design the cut, in every detail, and then specify the finish from a huge number of possibilities. THe higher the cost of the jeans, the higher the probability that the denim, and the finish, will be customised, or even originated, for those partiuclar jeans.

I did research the story of the LEvi Nevada Jeans relicas (the $45,000) ones. The denim was developed specifically for those jeans by Kurabo - vegetable dye denim, ecru (non bleached) cotton, the partiuclar look and irregularity of the weave. But all of these were variants of what Kurabo already produced. The finish had to match the specific original jeans, and I am presuming that LEvi's asked a couple of laundries to replicate that look and went for the one that did the best job at the best price, which in this case happened to be the Sights laundry.