After more than a decade in the game, our owner Jeremy has managed to wear more than just a few pairs of pants. He dug up some of his very favorites from over the years, and shared how they've aged in that time. You can see the full writeup and all the juicy pictures at GQ, but here's a preview before you go:
“One of my very first pairs of Japanese jeans was from Pure Blue Japan. It’s [run by] this one guy who's in love with fabric more than jeans, so the fit and the construction are not as good as a lot of other brands, but where he really shines is being super innovative with denim. Like, how slubby can you make it? How soft? What are all of these levers you can pull on selvage denim, on these old looms—inducing chatter, inducing more slub, inducing regularities—he's done all kinds of crazy shit. When I think about who's the first brand to really focus on fucking around in the fabric world, it was them. It took me a lot of effort to get these, because I got them before there were any American stockists, and it took a lot of back and forth, trading, and proxy buying to find the pair I wanted that fit the way I wanted them to. I wore those for five years straight, almost every single day, and it shows.” -Jeremy Smith via GQ
"Ooe has made this repro of an old Boss of the Road work pant for multiple iterations, and these are the best iteration. They'd gotten a repro of the original canvas duck made in Japan by a mill that bought the rights to an old American canvas brand called Alberton. We were originally gonna do multiple colorways, but it turned out to be so hard to sew that after this run, Hiro was just like, “I'm not doing it again.” It was snapping needles, it was snapping thread, and every pair took us twice as long as it needed to because this duck was so abrasive and so thick. It came to the point where they went to the thread manufacturers and, with the help of that whole community, they figured out how to sew it well. From there, I went on to beat the everlasting shit of these. I built the Berkeley shop wearing them, I crawled around in concrete for eight hours a day in them, and the pants themselves are still at 100% integrity, minus where I ripped out one of the hip pockets. They’re not jeans, but they’re very, very dear to me.” -Jeremy Smith via GQ
