Some guys collect vinyl, some collect watches, and some—like Standard & Strange’s denimhead-in-chief Jeremy Smith—collect jeans. Calling Smith a denim enthusiast, however, is a bit like calling A$AP Rocky a guy who likes jewelry. Smith is a denim connoisseur. As the co-founder of one of the country’s most respected destinations for high-grade dungarees, Smith has spent more than a decade immersed in the culture, science, business, and lore of denim and had access to some of the most covetable specimens on the planet, from century-old Levi’s dug out of barns to rare creations by Japan’s most revered denim artisans. Unsurprisingly, he’s amassed a formidable personal collection of jeans along the way.
This week, to celebrate Standard & Strange’s 10-year anniversary, the boutique is releasing the Ooe Yofukuten 10 Year Anniversary Jeans, a limited-edition collab with an enthusiast-grade denim brand that Smith describes as “the best jeans-makers in the world.” Crafted in Japan by a husband and wife duo with a fanatical devotion to old-school denim, Ooe Yofukuten (Ooe is pronounced OA) represents a culmination of everything Smith loves about the art and craft of jeans. In that vein, Standard & Strange will also be publishing Not Just A Pair Of Pants, a 98-page graphic novel that lays out the history, anatomy, and essential vocabulary of blue jeans in loving detail. In honor of the occasion—and his ongoing campaign to spread the gospel of high-quality denim with the world—Smith offered to give us a tour of his enviable denim collection, and tell us the stories behind a few of his favorite pairs.
1. Pure Blue Japan Slubby Indigo Selvedge Denim Jeans
“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.”
2. Ooe x S&S OA01 Golden Gate Denim Jeans
“I’m reluctant to say someone or something is the best in the world, and you won’t hear me say that about many things, because the definition of ‘best’ is so fuzzy. But I don’t know anyone else who could produce a better pair of jeans than Ooe Yofukuten. There’s no one more dedicated to the craft. Ryo patterns and cuts, Hiro sews, and every pair of jeans they make is only touched by the two of them. This is their sole focus in life. When we launched their first release in 2015, we were pushing into a bit of a headwind, because the trend was for all kinds of over-the-top textures designed to create intense, contrasty fades—it was the denim equivalent of triple-hopped beers with names like ‘Hop Mess Monster.’ In comparison, the denim Ooe uses is very quiet. It showcases the craftsmanship of the jeans and fades slowly and evenly, just like vintage. The 16oz Golden Gate denim was the first time we sat down with them in their workshop and put together a pair of jeans. It turned out that this denim is hard to fade, so these have a lot of wear on them, but it doesn’t show as much.”
3. Rising Sun Cone Mills Selvedge Denim Jeans
“Another one from the early years, from a now-defunct brand out of LA called Rising Sun, designed by a guy named Mike Hodis. Great denim designer. He also designed for JNCO and Lucky Brand. Rising Sun was part of the resurgence of American-made denim brands, and the first time I encountered them was in 2008 or 2009. These are a higher-rise, full-cut, suspender button jam, and they’re just good jeans. They weren’t flashy, they were just nice, high-quality denim.”
4. Jean Shop Selvedge Chambray Jeans
“These were made somewhere around 2010, and they’re made from chambray, not denim. It’s not a great material for jeans, I’ll be honest, because it’s not sturdy enough, but I wore the shit out of these. They’ve been repaired multiple times, they’ve got great fades, and they were a really good fit for the time. Jean Shop was a $300 pair of jeans back in the day, selvedge, made in New York City. It was very commercial, like, let’s take Japanese denim, use really nice trims, say everything’s the best of the best, and charge a premium price. It was a very Grey Goose move. But still, excellent jeans. I still love them. They’re kind of an outlier in my collection because they are so commercial and so uninteresting in so many ways, but I just can’t get rid of them.”
For GQ
5. Mister Freedom Indigo Jungle Cloth Jeans
“Jungle cloth is what is used in an N-1 Deck Jacket. You rarely see it in pants, and you never see it in jeans. So, Mister Freedom is tied up with another brand called Sugar Cane, and with another brand called Buzz Ricksons, all under the Toyo Enterprise umbrella. Sugar Cane had made a pair of army pants in black jungle cloth years ago, and I really wanted them, but couldn’t afford them. Then these came out. I’d never seen an indigo variant of this fabric, and I think it was just deadstock or sample fabric from Toyo that Christophe from Mister Freedom found, so I got them. It’s an amazing cut, amazing color, everything about them was just so good that I couldn’t pass them up.”
For GQ
6. Ooe Yofukuten Boss Duck Work Pants
“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.”
