カオナシ

The reactions to this tweet are telling. About a year ago, I spoke with someone who has worked in the high-end denim industry for a few decades. He's traveled the world to meet with some of the best indigo dyers, fabric weavers, and cut-and-sew factories. He lives and breathes denim. We talked about whether the US could ever create a high-end denim industry that could rival Japan's. His answer, delivered to me without any sentimentality, was a straightforward "No." According to him, the issue isn't just history. To be sure, Japan has a long history of weaving textiles, which has led to a particularly robust denim industry in and around Okayama Prefecture. It was here, after all, that farmers found that the soil was too saline for rice cultivation sometime in the 17th century, so they switched to cotton. Over the next four hundred years, cotton cultivation here supported the development of yarn spinning, fabric weaving, and eventually a cut-and-sew industry that specialized in producing some of the world's best jeans. Economists call these "industrial clusters," which can be remarkably durable and particularly fruitful for innovation. But according to my friend, history is not enough to explain why Japan excels at producing high-end denim. He believes culture also plays a role. It can be uncomfortable to invoke culture as an explanatory variable, especially in today’s political climate. To be sure, sometimes "culture" is just used as a lazy variable to explain things when someone doesn't know enough about history, institutions, or laws. It's not the first variable I turn to when trying to understand social outcomes. However, my friend feels strongly that differences between Japanese and American culture lead craftspeople in Japan to approach spinning, dyeing, and weaving more as an art than as an industrial processes. They are also more open to experimentation — tinkering with machines to get neppy weaves, using slubby yarns, dyeing hanks in unique ways. In the US, he claims, people are much more focused on profit and efficiency. There's less appreciation for craft and therefore less incentive to produce the kinds of unusual, labor-intensive fabrics that distinguish high-end Japanese denim. I still think some structural factors are involved. In a nation of 350 million people, I'm confident that there are tens of thousands of people interested in craft. However, they can't become artisans because few apprenticeship programs exist. Skyrocketing rents and car dependency make it hard to earn a living as an artist or craftsperson, as you have to forgo earning a lot of money for a long time. The US government also provides little support for apprenticeships and craft-based businesses. Additionally, US fashion media focuses much more on trends and celebrities. In Japan, you can find hundreds of speciality publications that really get into the weeds about bourbon, woodworking, denim, tailoring, and any other hobby you can imagine. This creates an informed consumer base ready to purchase things from artisans. This came to mind as I scrolled through the replies to this tweet — the incredulity of jeans costing $300 and confident claims that jeans are just jeans. Lots of people insisting that some brand's $100 jeans are the same as these that cost $300. $300 for jeans is not even expensive in this corner of menswear. This Business Insider episode below gets into why a pair of Momotaro jeans can cost upwards of $2,000. It has much to do with how the material is dyed and the fabric is handwoven. Is this ridiculous? Yes, on some level. But to my mind, no more ridiculous than a lot of stuff celebrated in the US, such as monster truck rallies, sports memorabilia culture, and the garages full of expensive recreational equipment that gets used once a decade. Textiles are one of our earliest forms of art, so it's never a surprise to me to hear that some prosaic garment can be made in a more artisanal and thus expensive manner. Of course, whether you're willing to pay the price of these garments is another matter. But appreciating craftsmanship is always free.