Handmade denim brands are on the rise. California has Roy Slaper, Sweden has Unionville, New York has 3×1, Norway has Livid Jeans, and Canada has it’s very handmade denim brand as well. Yet the notion of ‘handmade’ is a little misleading as all jeans are made by hand, whether it’s the >30$ jeans you find at the mall or the +300$ jeans you buy at stores like Self Edge. To talk about jeans that are locally hand crafted by skillful artisans and history-preserving enthusiasts would be a more precise description of the products of such brands. Outsider Denim certainly belongs to that last category. We asked the founders Colin Cripps and Antonio Teixeira (Tony Tex) to tell us a little more about themselves, their relationship to denim and how it all began.
The Levi’s Best of collection is a tribute to the originals with a commercial twist. This is a pair of the 501 shrink-to-fits from the premium red tab line. The designers have taken all the best features from historic jeans from the Levi’s archives and in many ways these jeans are identical to the top-of-the-line Levi’s Vintage Clothing products. Selvage fabrics (from Japan though, not Cone Mills), chain stitched hems, hidden selvage on the coin pocket, leather patch, punched through copper rivets, zink buttons, V-stitch at the top button, and single stitches on the back pockets. There’s no Big E on the red tab and they’re sewn in Turkey not America.
In the end of October 2011, I posted an article about Kasper Spacey’s everyday jeans: a pair of Levi’s Vintage Clothing 501 66′s (read it here). This article is about the exact same fit, but the story of how they came to look like they do is a bit different.
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