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Tender Co. Denim


braille_teeth

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Where can I find the Beekeeper's cloth in a Size 2 (as it's sold out on Oi Polloi)?

 

Almost exactly a year on........ new season square-tailed shirts and panel lined jackets all feature a 'Vaughn Pocket'  :)

 

 

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(shirt photos from Oi Polloi, jacket from Meadow)

 

Thank you Jason!

Edited by Articulate
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^thanks for this. I'm afraid very few of these were made, and size 2s are all gone. I have one left in a size 4 (here), or the long sleeve version in a 3 (here)- please let me know if you'd like measurements. A few shops have it available in ecru: Linder NY, Neighbour, Meadow, and The Hill-Side (not online, but they have them instore- I'm sure they'd be happy to help if you get in touch).

 

Alternatively, I'll be receiving this style in the same fabric in a full size run in woad, hopefully in the next week or so- please contact me if you'd like more details.

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Picked this shirt up couple of days ago from Delstore HK:

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Really love the wrinkle-y nature of the piece + collar design.

Not usually a shirt sleeve kind of person but this somehow works better then the long sleeve version.

Edited by redragon
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Picked this shirt up couple of days ago from Delstore HK. Really love the wrinkle-y nature of the piece + collar design.

Not usually a shirt sleeve kind of person but this somehow works better then the long sleeve version.

Thank you redragon! This was a special makeup for Del Store, I'm delighted you've got hold of one. The short sleeves are slightly longer than standard, which makes them feel not too short-sleevy, I think

 

Interested in seeing the woad dyed beekeepers cloth, could see that possibly being my first Tender shirt!

 

Thank you! I'll put pictures up as soon as they become available.

 

In the meantime, I've just received a set of photos from a very good friend of the brand, who's got some of the very earliest pieces, among others. Here are some of the first generation of indigo-dyed 130s:

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some special makeup logwood dyed 131s, made in the third season for Burg & Schild in Berlin:

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a first-generation type 428 shortsleeve tail shirt, without side pockets:

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and a lovely woad twill guard's jacket:

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on another note, I mentioned a few days ago that Oi Polloi organised a little get together at their London store. I've just been sent a write-up of the recording they made (very thoroughly edited!). It's online here, and I've copied it in below:

 

WILLIAM KROLL TALKS TENDER

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A week or so back we were joined by William Kroll of Tender fame down at our Soho shop for an informative chat about his designs. For those who couldn’t make it down, here are a few choice excerpts captured by portable recording device and transcribed for your enjoyment…

 
ON STARTING TENDER
 
“I started Tender in 2009, which is a very long time ago. It’s just me—I do it from home. I used to work at Evisu, and working with them I saw some really nice factories and saw some really great stuff in Japan. And my wife is American, I have friends who are American and I was into all the American stuff too. A lot of the Japanese stuff is American stuff that’s been Japanese-ified, and then a lot of the American stuff has that Japanese thing going on, so I thought it would be fun to do something that was British based, but with an understanding of those things.
 
The name Tender comes from the name for a coal truck on a steam engine. There’s also the tender loving care that goes into the clothes, and the idea that when you take on one of these garments, it becomes yours and you tend to it in the same way you’d look after your garden or your sheep.
 
The elephant on the label was an advert for a shipping company in the 19th century trying to get young men to go out to Nevada and seek their fortune. It seemed appropriate because that’s where jeans come from, and because it was Victorian and British.
 
The first season was a pair of jeans, a belt, a jacket and a t-shirt, and it’s just got bigger since then.â€
 
ON JEANS
 
“With jeans, if you’ve got a pocket on the inside you can see the outline on the outside. In tailoring everything is hidden. I feel like that sort of honesty is important—there’s no magic in it. I’d like to imagine that if I had some scrap metal and knew how to weld I could probably make some kind of steam engine, whereas I’ve got no chance of making a laptop. I think that’s a nice way to approach things.
 
I like product design. I like thinking about problems and solving problems, and I feel like jeans are a really nice opportunity for that. Everybody wears them and they’re all basically the same, which means the little changes you make are more meaningful than you’d expect.
 
On a pair of Levi’s you’ve got your spade pockets, your scoop pockets and your match pocket. Normal jeans stitch colours are yellow and orange, or gold and tobacco because you’re digging for gold and your only pleasure if tobacco. Levi’s did the match pocket, Wrangler did a coin pocket and Lee did a watch pocket because they were fancy. The factory boss wore Lee, the cowboy wore Wrangler and the dirt digger wore Levis.â€
 
DSC08883_1024x1024.jpg?17553937303932865
 
ON FANCY DYES
 
"You can look at anything, and as you get deeper and deeper you get more excited about things. When you get into the history of clothes, natural dyes and colours start to become really important.
 
The colours I’m using at the moment are woad, which is a natural indigo which grows in a cabbage-like weed in Europe, and madder, which is a soft pink that comes from a root.
 
Generally, natural dyes aren’t very good, which is why they’ve been replaced. They give soft colours and tend to wear out quite quickly. I think that it works really well with the idea that things evolve and change. If you’ve got something that’s natural, it’s probably going to change faster, and change in more interesting and unpredictable ways.â€
 
ON BUTTONS AND BRASS
 
“On railway uniforms you’d have generic garments which would come from a big wholesaler, but the buttons would be specific to your company or your rank, and would just slot in. Before tumble dryers, you put stuff through a mangle, so you would take your buttons off and crank your clothes through the mangle without damaging the buttons. I wanted to be able to do that.
 
I also wanted to make a unique button, but if you go to someone like YKK you’ve got to get 100,000 buttons at a time. I’m a confident guy, but I’m not that confident. I thought about what I could do that would match up with the steam engine stuff and I came up with a cast brass button that went on with a split pin.â€
 
ON THE BUTTERFLY SHIRT
 
“The idea of the Butterfly Shirt was to move things around. The name comes from the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and starts a tornado in Texas. I wanted to get rid of the side-seams and see what happened next. A lot of these things are intellectual exercises in a way—they can seem a bit silly but they can take you places.
 
Normally when you make a shirt you put your sleeves onto your body panels and then sew up the sides and up the sleeves, but when you haven’t got a side-seam you can’t do that. So I put the sleeve on upside down and sewed it down from the body panel. This means you’ve now got your cuffs upside down too.
 
On my standard shirts the pockets were stuck into side-seams, but you can’t do that with this so the pockets were pushed forwards instead, into the placket. Normally a placket is sewn inside, but you can’t do that because you’ve got to have the pockets going into something, so you’ve got the placket in upside-down. This means you’ve got to pull the collar forwards a little bit and have the washing label on the outside too.
 
You end up with a garment with all these details that are unavoidable. Because of one decision you end up with a completely new design.â€
 
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ON WHERE STUFF IS MADE
 
“Although all of my stuff is made in England and I’m really proud of that, I think there is a danger in getting too worked up about country of origin in some way. I think there are really good things happening in every country and you can have really amazing things made in China. People forget that for thousands of years there’s been handmade stuff in China, and you can get all sorts of tat coming out of Italy and the UK. It’s really about the people, especially at this micro-level. When there’s two people sewing stuff, they could be in any country.
 
But I think with countries there is a soul or a spirit that’s different. I’ve thought about this and tried to work out what the British thing was, and I think there’s a friendliness to it. From my point of view it’s approachable, and that ties in with the idea that the jeans are understandable and with the ceramics you can see that hands have made it. There is parallels with the Japanese stuff, but I don’t think it’s as refined.â€
 
ON JAPAN
 
"I spend a lot of time in Japan and the more time you spend in a country the more you realise that it’s just as nuanced as any other culture, but on a surface level, I think people there get really into specific things, and this whole idea of being an otaku, or a maniac, about something is really great.
 
In Japan there are people who want to buy this stuff, so then there are shops that sell this stuff that become really great, then all of a sudden it’s stocked in brilliant shops everywhere. But I think there are people in England who like Tender just as much as people in other countries—people are the same everywhere."
 
ON CREASED SHIRTS
 
“The creases are fully intentional. Someone showed me a photo of One Direction’s last tour, and one of them was wearing one of my shirts. I’d hit the big time. But the comments underneath were all saying, “What is Zayn doing in that horrible wrinkled shirt?â€
 
But yeah, the creases show the fabric. Because I use unshrunk yarn and the garments are washed during the dyeing stage, they shrink. This gives you puckered seams as the fabric shrinks at a different rate to the threads, which gives you a crosshatch as the fabric is being pulled in two directions at once.
 
It shows the personality of the cloth, whereas if you press something it can look really nice, but it becomes a different thing. And I don’t know how to iron a shirt, so there’s no reason I should impose that on anyone else.â€
 
------
 
I can't speak highly enough of the guys at Oi Polloi, and it was a really fun evening. Lovely to see some old friends and to meet some new people, too  :)
Edited by rodeo bill
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I see that the 422 woad dyed beekeepers cloth shirt is up on the store, do you happen to have measurements for the size 5?

Also is the fabric very breathable and lightweight?

Didn't know if posting here would be better than email or not.  :P

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Thanks Broark! Yes, woad dyed barge blue beekeeper's cloth long sleeved square tail shirts (there's a mouthful) are up on the Stores. Here's a photo of the texture, in (top to bottom) madder dyed, rinsed ecru, and woad barge:

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The cloth is a new development, loosely based on the cloth used in some beekeeping clothing- it's a cellular structure which allows it to be very 'deep' from one surface to the other (i.e. deeper than a bee sting) without being too heavy. I wouldn't say it's very lightweight, but it wears quite cool, especially worn open over a Tshirt, as a shirt-jacket.

 

The woad version above is a new colour, in that it's woad dyed by hand, on top of a navy piece-dye, so the colour is much darker than standard woad, but still has woad at the top, so retains the richness and variation of the natural dye.

 

Here are measurements for a size 5 in woad barge blue. For the record, the ecru version has only been cool rinsed and hang-dried, so comes up quite a bit bigger initially, but will shrink down in a hot wash/tumble.

 

chest (pit-to-pit): 25.5â€

shoulders: 21â€
full length: 31.5â€
sleeve (under arm) 23â€
 
Please feel free to email me with any further questions!
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  • 2 weeks later...

sorry for the lack of updates for a few days. other things on my mind:
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all brilliant here! we're all very well, happy, and sleepy. back to part-time work next week, then back to normal soon, but apologies if I'm a bit slow answering mail for a little while.

 

to keep things on track, ^that's a 422 woad linen calender square tail shirt  :)

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I'm going to put together a comprehensive-as-I-can list of all of Tender's denim cuts, mostly as I'm tired of searching for them online. From low to high:

 

Type 127

Slim-tapered, mid-rise

 

William's newest cut. From what I can see, somewhat similar to the 129 with a slightly bigger thigh and narrower hem.

 

Fit (from Meadow)

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Sizing (from Unionmade)

 

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A note on sizing that applies to all of the foregoing models: I am converting everything to centimeters and rounding off to the nearest 0.25 cm.

 

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Type 128

Straight leg

 

I'm having a hard time finding fit pics or measurements, so here's a shot of William's sample pair, worn around 6 months:

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Some notes on the fit, pulled from William's introduction of the 128 in mid-2014:

"Starting on the 128 late last year, I wanted to simplify a pair of jeans down to something very minimal, and I realised I was making a lot of similar decisions: there's no yoke (then because I hadn't noticed it was a separate panel, now because I wanted a flatter seat, making a yoke technically unnecessary) and the front pockets are put on as patches (then because I couldn't figure out a cut-in pocket, now because a patch seems like the simplest, cleanest technique, which matches the straight cut). There's no shape at all in the side seams, meaning the selvage runs all the way up to the waistband. Because there are no pocket bags, the size label can't go in the normal place (on the pocket bag) and is on the waistband, with the care tab sewn underneath it. I like how this brings things over to workwear, and emphasises the slightly navy issue feeling of these jeans."

 

The 128 seems to be practically nonexistent online, but William provided measurements of a size 1 (this model runs a bit large):

SIZE 1: Waist: 81.25 / Front rise 25.5 / Back rise 33 / Thigh 25.5 / Inseam 90.25 / Hem 20.25

So extrapolate from that what you will about the other sizes.

 

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Type 129

Slim-straight, mid-rise

 

From what I can gather, this is something of a '66 cut, or at least as close as we might get to it from the models available. Slim through the top block and a gentle taper from the knee down.

 

Fit (from Standard and Strange)

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Measurements (from Context)

 

Screen_Shot_2016_06_13_at_6_17_30_PM.png

Edited by chicote
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Type 130

Straight-tapered

 

Fit (from Hickorees)

Tender130UnbornJeans_L14.jpg

 

Tender130UnbornJeans_L16.jpg

 

Measurements (from Hickorees)

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Type 132

Wide leg

 

Tender's original cut! Check out the homemade jeans thread to see the construction process of the original pair.

 

Fit (from The Tastemakers and Takanna)

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Measurements (from New State and Takanna)

 

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Type 134

Straight-cut trew

 

Fit (from Rakuten and Nestrobe, respectively)

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Measurements (from The Tastemakers and somewhere else):

 

Screen_Shot_2016_06_13_at_6_19_24_PM.png

 

I'll continue to update this over time, sorry it's such a mess right now.

Edited by chicote
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^^this is so fantastic, thank you so much Chicote, and I'm embarrassed that I haven't put this together myself. Really really appreciate it. 

 

Also nice to see the homemade jeans thread after all this time! "I haven;t got any plans to do a production run any time soon" was true at the time, honestly.  :)

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a small teaser for a project I've been working on with Akira, my partner in Tokyo:

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We're still sorting everything out, so I'll put more photos up as soon as possible. For anyone in Tokyo, the address is #101 FORUM SENDAGAYA, 3-15-14 SENDAGAYA, SHIBUYA, TOKYO 151-0051, JAPAN. You can contact me with any questions, or you contact Akira directly in Japanese or English at [email protected]

 

exciting!

 

 

Akira now has the space open, with a good selection of past, new, and special stock, as well as the full range of GS/TP watches, and other brands and products collected from around the world. Here are a few photos:

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Wow, the store looks fantastic! I'm intrigued by the table in the middle of that open space--it's very welcoming, like being invited into someone's home. Very fitting for the brand. Congrats akira and william!

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  • 2 weeks later...

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