Hey- I’m sorry this is a day late. I have a lot to say about denim and I had a hard time whittling this down. I hope you enjoy.
I truly cannot overstate how breathtaking I find denim. Centuries of ingenuity, innovation, and institutional effort have diverged on a final product that is meant to feel completely effortless to you. No other product experience in my life has come close to invoking a real sense of quiet pride and awe as putting on a pair of structured cotton jeans has. I'm still chasing this high in new pieces today.
I must shamefully admit that I’ve owned countless pairs in my lifetime in search of the one. I’ve made a terrible habit of buying a pair – the same 100% organic cotton, straight leg style - from everywhere I’ve travelled in the world as a souvenir since 2016. Although I love pairs from today’s sustainable, ethical, and extremely expensive fashion darlings like Reformation, Weekday, and Citizens of Humanity, I must admit the best pair I own in terms comfort and structure is plain old vintage. You can’t even argue that these brands are peddling low quality fast fashion, because they built their brands on the promise of doing the opposite. Denim is simply not made like it used to be, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, it’s kind of what we wanted.
The sentiment that product quality is worse than before across every consumer industry isn’t new, but it’s unexpected because our manufacturing technology is miles more advanced. In this essay I’ll juxtapose this sentiment against advances that have been made denim production to discover themes that can be used to explain worsening quality across every industry. Here’s what I’ll be covering:
Textiles 101
A framework to analyze textiles
Traditional denim attributes
Themes of change in denim innovation to apply generally
Textiles 101
If you’re not using animal skin, you'll need start with thread. You’ll need to find some raw fiber with micro strands that can be spun together and won’t snap. This is surprisingly difficult to find, especially sustainably, because there are very few natural fibers that are conducive to being spun into a durable thread while synthetic fibers are often made with harmful chemicals. You’ll want to consider several properties of this thread that will make it into the final fabric such as elasticity, shrinkage, and absorbance.
Next, you’ll need to decide how to turn your thread into a fabric. For all the functions fabric performs, it's astonishing to think almost all its production boils down to 2 methods: knitting or weaving.
Weaving is done by interlocking threads tightly together in a grid. The threads are packed tightly together, resulting in a fabric that is structured, stiff, and durable. Since woven fabrics are made of many threads they aren't going to unravel if there is a loose thread or tear.
Knitting, by contrast, is done by looping a single string around itself to form fabric. Looping thread introduces space between the threads that allows a fabric to stretch, drape, and breathe. Fun fact- Crochet falls into the category of knits but has always held a special place in my heart because we haven't been able to mechanically produce it yet.
These grossly oversimplified inputs create a framework which we can use to generally understand and categorize fabrics:
Traditional denim attributes
Let’s use the above framework to piece together what made denim so magical. In 1873, Levi Strauss patented these denim pants as we know them now and he sold them alongside another pair of pants that he also patented: Canvas brown “duck” pants.
They were both meant to be workmen’s pants, but denim absolutely blew these brown pants out of the water. They were both made from 100% cotton material, but what made them so different? Let me tell you about the differences in their construction and treatments.
Twill weave
Since cotton doesn’t stretch, knitting cotton is a no-brainer for most clothes we wear because it allows the fabric to have some give. What happens when you weave cotton in the simplest weave everyone knows, called the “plain weave”?
The result is an extremely stiff, heavyweight, durable material. This weaving cotton in this pattern produces a material called canvas, and it’s so tough that it’s used to make backpacks and shoes that last years.
Say you’re a seamstress and you want to weave cotton so it’s a little less stiff. You still want the durability of a woven fabric but you need to allow the individual threads to move in place a bit so the fabric performs more like a knit. You think- Why don’t why don’t you introduce more space by weaving every two strands instead of one?
You try this and you find your pattern now has a bit of a ribbing because the vertical threads are thicker. To smooth out the fabric, you decide to get a little wild and alternate the two vertical strands above and below the horizontal thread, like so:
To your delight, you end up with a material that is less stiff because the threads have more room to move. This weave leaves a distinctive diagonal of bunched threads across your fabric. The pattern comes to be known as the “twill” weave, and centuries later it’s used as the basis of the most iconic fabrics, from Chanel tweed to Burberry gabardine trench coats.
Levi Strauss’s brown duck pants were a plain weave, and the jury of history votes that it wasn’t as comfortable.
Indigo dyed cotton thread
The vertical threads of denim are dyed indigo while the horizontal threads are left white. The white thread is kind of hidden because there are more blue threads, but they are more visible on the backside of denim. It also becomes obvious if there is a tear in the denim.
Different coloured dyes can change the feel and composition of a fabric more than people think, which I believe had something to do with the brown pants not being as popular.
Artificial indigo dye had a special property of clinging onto the surface fibers of cotton instead of permeating the core. When it sits on the surface, it’s more prone to washing or rubbing off than other dye colours. As the dye washes away, it take some of the surface fibers of the cotton thread along with it, which softens the fabric and fades the colour over time. Brown dyed canvas would simply never fade this way.
Arguably the most romanticized aspect of the vintage denim jean is how it’s meant to become more comfortable and more personalized the more you wear it over years. It’s a far cry from today’s push from haute couture and fast fashion to wear as much new and different shit as possible.
The weave and the indigo cotton are a simplified formula for a material that has withstood the hardest stress test: Time. It’s durable but comfortable, it’s structured but softens, and it also moulds to your body over time without losing shape. These are the feelings we associate with old fashioned denim. Let’s now look at the factors that alter this delicate balance.
Changes in denim production
Textile technology is incredibly advanced and there’s no way that it is more difficult to make old fashioned denim than it used to be. The nuanced truth is just that consumers don’t value those factors as much as other advancements in denim production.
1. Increasing consistency for lower cost and improved quality control
All woven fabrics used to be made on a shuttle loom. Mechanized weaving has introduced a faster, more consistent, larger successor: The projectile loom.
The shuttle loom
Looms work by draping the vertical threads across a surface in some alternating pattern and then providing a mechanism to push a horizonal thread through. Hand operated looms had this large block called a shuttle that workers pushed through the loom. See this short video to understand what I’m describing:
Shuttle looms were 30 to 32 inches wide so you could easily throw the shuttle all the way through the thread. When weaving across, the horizontal thread was not cut, creating a closed edge on the side of the woven fabric. This property of shuttle loom woven fabric is called a self-edge, or “selvedge”.
Shuttle looms were prone to introducing some inconsistencies in fabric where some areas were tighter and some looser, depending on how fast someone worked or how taut they pulled the thread.
Mechanizing looms
Somewhere along the line someone recognized that mechanizing a shuttle loom would take a lot of energy, so a few minor modifications were made:
The shuttle was made a lot smaller until it was the size of a bullet so it could be shot in a straight line for a longer distance
Hence, the loom was widened to produce a lot more fabric
Instead of weaving the same horizontal thread back and forth, horizontal threads were cut at the end of each row.
Shuttle/selvege machines pretty much went extinct in the US during World War II when the army needed mass quantities of fabric very quickly, giving way to these new projectile looms that produced a larger width of fabric at a consistent high speed. How is making the same product more cost effective and consistent not a win for everyone?
It turns out that weaving cotton threads tighter and faster creates a material that is taut, more prone to breaking, and doesn’t breathe or break in as well. Newly made 100% cotton jeans are going to be stiffer and more fragile. There are hardly any selvedge looms left in the world.
Non-selvedge denim is a good sign that the product is going to come out more structured, more brittle, and more uncomfortable to wear without elastane.
2. Product line expansion
Denim solved for a single niche when it was introduced. As it has has evolved to fit more tastes, bodies, and budgets, we’ve seen a proliferation of value in offerings provided to the consumer at the detriment of meeting the standards of traditional denim.
It took a friend telling me that she only bought grey stretch denim for me to appreciate the innovation required to turn unforgiving denim into form fitting pants while improving comfort and retaining the same look and feel. Look at this fit chart of the different Levi’s styles someone was recommending to men on Reddit:
One of these notable innovations is advertised as “4 way stretch”. Let’s unpack the innovation using the fabric framework I provided:
Material: Manufacturers wanted the overall feel of cotton and some properties of a stretchy thread, found only in plastic synthetics.
Treatment: They blended the cotton and stretchy synthetic thread together
Construction: The fabric is still woven in a twill pattern. “4 way stretch” would indicate that both the horizontal and vertical threads had this blended thread, while “2 way stretch” would mean it might just be one or the other.
The trade-offs of this treatment are as follows:
Elastics lose their elasticity over time – Planned obsolescence is built into the product
Plastic materials release microplastics as you wear them and are more difficult to recycle – Worse for the environment
3. Marketing and branding obscuring product details
Finally, I’d love to show you how denim as been portrayed in media over the last century.
Here’s a woman in Vogue, 1935.
Vogue, 1970:
Vogue, 1999 (left), and 2012 (right)
We are obsessed with the story of denim. We love that it represents all American ruggedness and grit. It’s both timeless and a symbol of counter-culture. Denim never looks like you’re trying too hard, and yet it’s put together enough to demonstrate you put thought into your appearance.
“I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.”
— Yves Saint Laurent, 1983
We want denim to fit in our life, and advertising has made us believe it can. Traditional denim wasn’t meant to be stretchy like leggings, soft like loungewear, or water-resistant like nylon, but that’s how it’s sold to us. When we buy products like skinny jeans that are packaged to tell a certain story, we send the message to designers and manufacturers that they are changing the product in a way we desire. That’s why denim isn’t what it used to be. That’s why a lot of products aren’t what they used to be.
How does this apply to all products evolving? Improving consistency and speed will decrease a product’s ability to wear uniquely. Products are made differently to solve for different customer needs- Most denim wearers these days are not gold panners or miners.
The bottom line is consumers find more value in the themes of innovation that I’ve outlined above. They want to buy from a brand or story they love. They want to pay less for what they think is the same thing. They want a product that is more targeted to their specific needs. These attributes usually come at a detriment to the traditional quality attributes of a product, and therefore when marketers at legacy brands advertise their product as being high quality, it’s seen as disingenuous.
I hope my denim snobbery was palatable in this essay- Please let me know if you found it interesting (you can reply to this email). See you next Tuesday!