TCB Two Cat’s Waist Overall Natural Indigo

Viktor Fredbäck is a famous jeans hunter worldwide. It’s been more than half a century after the gold rush, but he still goes into old mines to find blue gold at the risk of his life. He is a pure denim freak who dares to walk into the darkness only with some light of a headlight, knowing that any troubles could happen anytime. So he goes through some trackless paths, pushing aside mountains of pebbles to find the heritage of the past.

His collections have lots of ultra-rare vintages, and some are even exhibited at museums as historical pieces. The Olympic Brand jeans he lent TCB is also the only pair found in the world as of 2021. TCB also had to go in full swing to respond to his love and passion for blue garments.

It’s fair to say that the spinning technics back then were not fully developed. All denim reproduction brands are trying to replicate the irregularity by lots of different methods, mostly computer-regulated ways. But I came up with an unprecedented way to do it.

When TCB produces a new fabric, they always choose the right cotton breed and its blend ratio. This time, they have made a new fabric from a scrap fabric of 1910 woven by Amoskeag mill, later replaced with the famous Cone mill as you know. Having a glimpse at the fabric, they immediately noticed the strong irregularity on each yarn, by far the strongest slubby and neppy denim compared to numerous vintage Levis jeans. So, it was this slubbiness that was the key to reproducing this fabric.

Usually, when making the irregularity of the threads, they change the thickness of the threads and use that one thread for the whole fabric. But no one has not made it one step further about this. Of course, the quality of cotton from the old days was unstable and poor, but the spinning as well for sure. So this time, TCB has decided to use two different threads spun by two different spinning indexes: 80% hard-spun, and the rest of 20% have half the spinning index used for the said hard-spun.

Of course, they wanted to make perfectly spun, perfectly woven, perfectly dyed fabric back then. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, the spinning was unstable, so it’s like not the irregularity on the thickness of the threads. Still, the irregularity of the spinning index played a significant role in vintage fades. If the spinning index is different, the dyeing absorbency differs even on a thread so that they’ll develop the most natural irregularity of indigo dye too. The cotton used is EMOT cotton (East Memphis, New Orleans and Texas) blended with some Pima cotton from the state’s southwest. Pima gives a nice and creamy brownish tinge to the threads, and this blend was a perfect balance. This fabric is 10.7oz

Sakamoto Denim did the dyeing process in Okayama. Natural indigo rope dye requires some confidential know-how so that we couldn’t even get in the factory for photo shooting. As far as we know, only 1 or 2 factories in Japan can do it.

The threads of this natural indigo fabric go into the pool of indigo 16 times. Our aim on the new fabric is strong stubbiness and strong irregularity on the surface. To achieve that, they need to speed down the rotating speed of the shuttle as much as possible.

As for logwood fabric, the warps are hank dyed by logwood, and the wefts are ecru. The rotation speed of the shuttle must be slow to get the vintage feel on the fabric. There are more than 50 vintage shuttle looms in the room, but the two machines weaving TCB denim was moving much more slowly than others. When it comes to hank dyed threads, they are much shorter than those dyed by rope dyeing. So, when they weave them, they need to connect each thread so that a knot occurs at every certain length. Therefore, workers need to constantly check the fabric to put those knots to the backside of the fabric. These knots are the proof that the fabric was actually hank dyed.

The shuttles from Nihonmenpu are a bit bigger than normal ones. Wefts are cast into the warps by the shuttles moving laterally, and the heddles that move the warps up and down need to move much more than usual. As a result, the texture of fabric gets soft like a hand-woven fabric and gets natural slubbiness.