RE DENIM Development Log #03

In #01, I wrote that the twist stayed outside the calculations to the very end.

Killed in the weaving, killed in the finishing — and never once spoken of.

FUKUBORI faces this twist from the side of the fabric that causes it, and the pattern.

Not in the weaving. Not in the finishing. In the pattern.

A vintage 501 is a bundle of premises

A vintage 501 is the name of one garment — and at the same time, a bundle: a set of premises, each recognized on its own, tied together.

Being selvedge.
Being button-fly.
Being riveted.
Shrinking.
Twisting.
The dye fading.

Each is an independent decision, each with its own reason.
They are simply tied together under the framework of workwear, into a single garment.

Reinterpretation, as I see it, means untying this bundle once — and tying it again.

Change everything, and you have a different garment. Change nothing, and you have a copy.

With most of the premises left in place, what I chose to focus on was the twist.

The premise I inverted: the twist

Shrink-to-Fit shows no twist.

That is the premise I inverted this time.

Only the shrinking was made into a product; the twist was left outside the calculations.
I redraw that line, onto our side.

Use loomstate fabric, keep Shrink-to-Fit alive, and face the twist.

The twist that was treated as a problem back then has, with time, become a given of vintage denim — called character, and loved.

Today it is an element you cannot take out of vintage.

As a vintage lover myself, I understand that appeal almost painfully well.
But this time, I reset the premise — the same way Shrink-to-Fit once did.
And that is

the place where this garment is finished.

This is an easy place to misunderstand, so let me make it clear.

Any pair of Shrink-to-Fit jeans shrinks when washed.
You soak and knead them to fit your body.

The twist is handled the same way.
After the wash, it settles into its natural form.


Back then, the twist that appeared in the wash had the side of an accident.
Where it would turn, and by how much — nobody designed that.
So it was straightened back square by machine, and cancelled out with pre-skew.

As I wrote in #01.

This product does not erase the twist. It is built in the direction the twist returns.

When the first water goes through, the twist moves. Where it lands is the designed form.
When the twist has finished moving, the garment is finished.

And that change, all the way to the finish, happens in your hands.

The seat, a by-product

In building the structure that manages the twist, I gained something.

A curve in the seat.

The seat of a vintage 501 is built remarkably straight.
Seen through a pattern maker's eyes, it would not be an exaggeration to call it the single greatest feature.

Let me put numbers on it.
Some time ago, I took the seat seams of five disassembled models, drafted each back into a pattern, and measured them.
The maximum depth of the seat curve.

Maximum curve depth
501XX-47 17mm
11MWZ 28mm
101Z 32mm
517-66 (late) 34mm
701 56mm

* Measured on the finished lines.
Measured from patterns I drafted from each disassembled garment; actual dimensions vary by size. My own corrections are built into these numbers — they do not guarantee the originals. Some garments have no surviving size markings, so I am not listing sizes here.

Only the 501 sits at 17mm.
The others scatter from 28mm to 56mm.
In this comparison, the 501's seat is unmistakably on the straight side.

Why straight? Efficiency — in felled seams, in cutting.

On denim, the seam allowances differ in width from left to right.
Because the seam is rolled in as it is sewn, a curved line creates a gap between the outer and inner radius, and the sewing becomes difficult. It also causes the defect the factory floor calls a blowout.

A straight line creates no such gap.
And in cutting, the straighter the line, the easier it cuts.

In other words, the 501's straight seat is not an aesthetic choice.
It is an answer to production as a whole.

But the human body is not straight.

Taken to the extreme, a perfectly straight line may not exist anywhere on the body at all.
It depends on each person's build, of course, but the stretch from the seat down to the crotch is, I would say, one of the roundest territories on the body.

A curve that captures that roundness — there is none.
That is roughly the way to picture it.

That said, I cannot flatly claim the straightness alone produces this result.
Where on the waist you wear them has an enormous influence.

High on the waist, pulled all the way up.
Or dropped easy on the hips.
Broadly, those are the two choices.

A straight seat means the roundness of the seat is not being captured.
So wear them high, and they dig into the curve.

Wear them on the hips, and the crotch of the pants moves away from the crotch of the body.
That distance creates ease, and the digging-in resolves.
But the roundness still isn't captured, so now there is excess.
A silhouette takes shape — something like a diaper.

My conclusion: I consider the 501 a pair of pants to be worn on the hips.

These two are only the extremes.
The size you chose, your bone structure, the silhouette itself.
Everything intertwines, and the cases are endless.
I'd be glad if you kept that in mind.

And this is hard to observe on unwashed jeans.
Stiff with starch, the silhouette doesn't show.
Denim shrinks in the wash, so it isn't even the final form.

From where I stand, that is also part of the beauty.
That vintage silhouette is made out of straight lines.
It is, I think, the greatest part of what makes a 501 look like a 501.
And for that very reason, it is a curse that only necessity can lift.

This time, in a construction that uses the selvedge while deliberately creating twist, building it straight was impossible.

Where pieces join, their edges have to flow together smoothly, up to a point.
Put bluntly: you cannot take two jagged shapes and join them by direction alone. Though this is cloth, so there is some give.

And because I changed the left and right shapes to correct the twist, that joining needed adjusting.

Out of necessity, a curve was born in the seat.

I measured this pattern the same way. Size 2.

37.7mm. 2.2 times the 501.

The tilt of the center back has barely moved from the 501.
What moved is only the depth of the curve.

The interesting part is that this movement has a precedent.
When the 517 went bootcut, it kept the tilt almost unchanged and moved only the depth of the curve. Against the 501's 17mm, the 517 sits at 34mm — exactly double the depth.
Almost the same alteration as this one.

But the 517 did it on purpose.
To absorb the fine vibration of a cowboy on horseback — or so I recall reading somewhere, once.

This one is different.
Handling the twist in the structure made a straight line impossible to draw.
Different purposes — and the numbers landed in nearly the same place.

And let me be honest here. This 37.7mm is on the deep side even among the five.
Deeper than the 11MWZ, than the 101Z, than the 517.

Only the 701 is deeper, and I see that one as a separate lineage.
A seat deepened to fit the body, made for women — it does not sit in the flow of workwear.
Which means that within the workwear lineage, once the 701 is set aside, this one is the deepest.

It is also a number that has traveled farthest from the 501's greatest feature.

And in truth, what this gave back is substantial.

Worn on the hips: the diaper shape, reduced.
Worn high: the digging-in, reduced.
It depends on the body, so I will keep to the word "reduced," not "resolved."

In exchange, one of the shape's greatest features is lost.

But the soul of it is not lost. This is not a line I drew because I wanted it.
The structure that handles the twist made it so.
It is a result that necessity produced.

Arriving at this conclusion naturally, with my own hands in the work — it gave me chills.

Can this be called FUKUBORI?

Reading this far, a question will have surfaced for some of you.

Hasn't this strayed too far from the source?

Having put the seat numbers on the table, I have to answer it head-on.
With changes of this scale, can it still be called a FUKUBORI edit?

First, let me confirm one premise.

The source of this pair is, in fact, not the 501. It is Levi's RED.

When RED set out to reinterpret vintage, it chose the 501 as the representative.
The 501 was the referenced object there — never the object to be copied.

What I am responding to is RED's stance.
If so, the question is not "how far from the 501 has it traveled."
It is whether it holds together as a reinterpretation.

FUKUBORI's editing principle is: never change so much that the source becomes unrecognizable.
In appearance, you could say this one steps outside that principle.
But RED is a garment that had already walked the road of reinterpretation — the one exceptional case.

My answer is this.

Follow the outline of the original's original — the 501 — while editing the structure called reinterpretation, as FUKUBORI.

RED's reinterpretation of that absolute, the 501, is masterful.
Not only expressing the twist in three dimensions — the fabric efficiency, the selvedge usage,
even the thinking behind the trims, all of it embodied. Genuinely remarkable.

Which is exactly why I want to face it head-on, with what I can do now.
Loomstate fabric, and Shrink-to-Fit itself, taken as the essence of vintage — that reinterpretation.
That is what makes this, as FUKUBORI, an edit of RED.

Fabric is a variable

Of the two lines, this product is the edited one.
It is not Archive. The reason is in #02.

And finally, one thing I want to set down.

For FUKUBORI, which holds up "a garment is a structure,"
fabric is a variable.
Being loomstate is absolute for this pattern,
and this time — born of facing loomstate fabric and reinterpreting it — is no exception.

Put the other way around: the structure remains.

This original fabric ends with this one run.
But making this structure in other loomstate fabrics is something I intend to keep doing, as FUKUBORI products.

What continues is the structure. This fabric, in this quantity, is this once only.

Next time, I want to talk about the finished sample.