DENIMandPATCHES

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The Return of Sweater Weather with a “Double Heavy” Wonder Looper and 100% Merino Gustin

I don’t wear knitwear—heavyweight flannels became my go-to sweaters years ago. 

The exception is the wool I wear on my head: you’ll see me in my red Heimat Mechanics Hat all winter—half a decade old now, still not showing any signs of pilling.

But I know autumn means getting the sweaters back out—or finding another one—for plenty of denim people. Judging by my inbox this week, brands and retailers know that too.

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When Sweatshirts Start Breaking Rules

I think 14 oz. is pretty heavy for a sweatshirt. I can barely imagine what one almost twice as heavy feels like.

Wonder Looper’s Double Heavyweight French Terry comes in at 25.8 oz. per square yard. That’s a lot of cotton. Redcast and Brooklyn both stock it—your courier will get the first workout.

Gustin takes the opposite route with a 10 oz. loop-back French terry made from 100% merino wool: a classic sweater fibre knitted in Japan, then cut into a sweatshirt and a zip hoodie in the US.

For actual knitwear, everyone’s favourite German loopwheel brand also does other stuff than tees. Franklin & Poe and Cultizm have new Merz b. Schwanen merino-cashmere and waffle knits, while Heimat is back in Philly with another batch of substantial German-made sweaters.

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Samurai Takes the Title in Year Five

Last week, we announced the winners of IIY5 in the ROW, SEA and Re(Pair) conferences. One decision was still open: whether ROW winner J-B’s Iron Hearts or SEA winner Bima Rosyid’s Samurai would take the overall title.

The decision was up to Bryan and Ruedi, who were split, so the judges got one more vote. I went for J-B’s sharper contrast. A comfortable majority preferred the overall harmony of Bima’s fades, making Bima the overall Year Five winner.

With the result settled, the winners now start choosing their showcases—Bryan’s name for the bundles of prizes.

Bima wore his pair every day, washed them around three times, darned a complete crotch blowout and even tried playing basketball in them once. He says that was extremely uncomfortable.

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Things Worth Your Attention

A giveaway, a long-awaited return, and three more things that made the cut for this issue:

• Heddels Stitchdown Expo giveaway – More than $1,500 in prizes, including two Collector Passes, custom Nicks Boots with a matching belt, Grant Stone loafers and a Saphir care kit; entry closes 4 October, and I happen to be breaking in a Nicks belt for a future review.
• TCB at Redcast – The Cats Drive jeans and jacket are back after nearly three years, alongside the broader 20s-to-60s restock and the newer 13.5 oz. Baggy 50’s Jeans.
• Brave Star heavyweight drop – The current run is stacked with 21.5 oz. Reaper, Frankenstein and Mayhem Mojave jackets plus the 20.5 oz. Odin jeans, so heavyweight season is very much underway.
• Unmarked and Y’2 Leather at Cultizm – I’ve really been looking forward to getting the Unmarked Chelseas I’m meant to review. In the meantime, the DB Hunter Cap Toes that just dropped caught my eye too, along with Y’2’s cherry-aniline LSR-42.
• KATO Teacore – The new 14.5 oz. Japanese selvedge uses brown cotton yarn beneath the indigo, so the fades should reveal a brown-tinted core instead of the usual white. The Hammer Straight is the one I’m watching.

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Building My Brand: Pitching AW27 to Retailers

This week marked another milestone for Weirloom. Martin, who’s coming in to handle sales, has started reaching out to retailers.

Our updated brand pitch is done, and the AW27 line sheet is coming together. The collection will span the three jeans fits in new fabrics and washes, three shirt styles in Italian and Japanese fabrics, plus a full jersey programme with new T-shirts, a couple of thermals and a hoodie jacket.

We’ll start taking orders in mid-November, so I still have a mountain of work ahead of me. But it feels SO good.

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From the Archive: Fisherman’s Sweaters

Since I’ve spent half this issue explaining why I don’t wear sweaters, here’s the guide for everyone who does.

It gets into why dense five-ply wool worked so well in cold, wet maritime conditions, then runs through modern versions from Heimat, S.N.S. Herning, Andersen-Andersen, Filson and more. 

The Heimat U-Boat is especially fitting today: roughly a kilo of oily five-ply wool, made in Germany.

The post Heavyweight Denim Makes Sense, But a 25 oz. Sweatshirt? appeared first on Denimhunters.

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Balenciaga’s Spring 2027 collection is definitely interesting. Because it isn’t simply a return to the oversized Demna-era look. Piccioli is taking ordinary jeans and leather jackets and giving them couture-level construction and proportion. The result is a more sophisticated version of the classic jeans + leather jacket formula.

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first Spring 2027 collection at Balenciaga brings couture construction into everyday wardrobe staples, specifically including jeans and leather jackets.

And yes, ripped and distressed jeans are definitely present!

Denim is low-slung, relaxed jeans rather than skinny. Heavily distressed/ripped denim with a lived-in, worn character. Long, dragging hems in some looks. Blue denim is treated as an everyday wardrobe foundation rather than a decorative fashion fabric. Jeans are even worn under evening gowns, deliberately collapsing the boundary between casual and couture.

The Leather story is softer than the old Balenciaga biker aesthetic:

Leather is treated as part of the everyday wardrobe alongside denim, bombers, T-shirts and tailoring.

Brown leather jackets with cinched waists and sculptural/ruffled peplum proportions. Washed leathers that soften the surface and silhouette. And also lightweight nappa leather is used to reshape Balenciaga’s familiar Rodeo and Le City bag forms.

Watch the complete video of the Spring 2027 runway show below.

You can shop for the current Balenciaga collection on the brand’s website, at Saks Fifthe Avenue, FWRD, and at Nordstrom.

The post Balenciaga – Spring 2027 Denim & Leather first appeared on Denimology.

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33 oz. Denim, the ‘Best Selvedge Jeans for Men’ (Any Budget), and the Indigo Invitational Winners

I was going to open this issue with something I’ve learned trying to make 20 oz. jeans: heavyweight denim becomes a production problem before it ever becomes a wearing problem.

But then Bryan messaged me this morning asking when I was going to finish the Indigo Invitational Year Five winners announcement. I’d missed the earlier WhatsApp messages; he should’ve sent an email. A little swearing later, I dropped the Weekly and switched jobs.

The winners are further down. First, back to what it takes to make denim this heavy.

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What It Takes to Make 33 oz. Denim

Talking about 20 oz. Weirloom jeans has made me realise how quickly denim weight becomes a production problem rather than a wearing problem.

In my new SOSOBROTHERS story, 33 oz. cuts weaving output from 100–120 yards a day to around 30—and that is only the beginning.

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The Jeans Guide I’ve Wanted to Write for Years

I keep seeing big-name publications publish their versions of “best jeans for men” guides. GQ put out another one this week.

And every time, part of me thinks: if anyone should be able to make this genuinely useful for denim people, it should be me. So I finally did.

What began as two separate guides—one for the pairs people start with, another as my answer to the generic best-jeans lists—became one:

17 handpicked selvedge jeans across three price tiers, with the five I’d send most people to first right at the top.

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Things Worth Your Attention

The inbox was doing its best to turn this into a much longer issue. These five survived:

• Self Edge turns 20 – 20 collaborations with 20 brands, staff from all six stores and a three-day San Francisco Weekender in November; Self Edge calls it the largest public gathering of Japanese brands yet held in North America.
• Hansen keeps pushing denim – I’ve known the Copenhagen-based brand since the early days of Denimhunters, so seeing the Robby Wide Cut Jeans in 13 oz. neppy Japanese denim, made in Japan, feels like a natural continuation of the denim programme they launched last summer.
• Denim-jacket season is here – KATO’s streamlined Blade and Brave Star’s 14 oz. sherpa-lined Brown Bear Ironside sit at opposite ends of the same autumn urge, which is good timing while I’m working on a new jacket guide.
• Flannels are back too – Brooklyn has UES’s 14.5 oz. heavyweight flannel, while Franklin & Poe has 3sixteen’s Brown/Ecru Crosscut; two very different ways to admit summer is over.
• Fifteen years, fifteen boots – My good friend Wouter is marking 15 years of Long John with 15 customised Red Wing 875s. Unmistakably Wouter, and the pairs release on September 26 at Black & Blue in Nijmegen.

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The Year Five Winners Are In

More than 2,500 faders started Year Five of the Indigo Invitational. Over 650 made it to the finish, and after the Top 50, community voting and final judging, 25 pairs now make up the winners across the two conferences and Re(Pair).

I was on the judging panel, so I’ve already spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at some of these fades. Jorn-Bjorn from Norway won ROW in 19 oz. Iron Heart IH-555L, while Bima from Indonesia won SEA in 19 oz. Samurai S710XX, and Alex Scheibner won Re(Pair) in his 21 oz. Brave Star True Straights (meaning he can—hopefully—finally put some wear into his Weirlooms).

The full announcement has all 25 winners and the judges’ comments.

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From the Archive: Last Year’s Winners

With Year Five finally settled, the obvious archive pick is the Year Four results. It’s worth a look back before you dive into the new winners—if only to see how high the bar already was.

See last year’s winners →

The post Why Heavyweight Denim Is Not Only Harder to Fade appeared first on Denimhunters.

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Why SOSOBROTHERS Is Limiting Its 33 oz. Range to Maximum 20 Pieces a Month

33 oz. isn’t just another fabric in the range—it’s essential to SOSOBROTHERS, the Swedish custom-made brand. The Breaker of Legs and The Breaker of Arms became products customers could come back to.

Making denim this heavy is difficult. Keeping it in production is an even bigger challenge—and right now, there’s no guarantee more can be made once the current rolls are gone. For the foreseeable future, the entire 33 oz. range is limited to up to 20 pieces a month.

The reason becomes clearer when you follow the denim through production: from the yarn and the loom to the sewing floor, and then into the hands of the people who have to break it in and wear it.

Why 33 oz. Is So Difficult to Make

I’ve handled this denim for my review of The Breaker of Legs (TBOL) jeans. The sheer weight is one thing, but what really stands out is how reluctant the fabric is to fold and crease. That starts with the yarn.

It’s made from Australian long-staple cotton. The latest batch uses 4-ply 6s yarn in both warp and weft to make the denim stiffer. You need all that yarn to get enough mass into the cloth. But the number that really caught my attention was loom speed.

Vintage shuttle looms normally weave 100–120 yards of denim per day. With denim this heavy, output drops to around 30 yards. The immense load simply forces the loom to run that much slower.

Material loss rises sharply too. The supplier puts it at around 5–6% on 22 oz. denim, but as high as 25–30% on the 33 oz. A worker who would normally monitor six to eight looms is effectively tied to one. And even before weaving starts, dyeing, sizing, twisting and warping also need tighter control.

The Loom Is Only Half the Problem

Getting the denim off the loom only solves the first problem. Because somebody still has to cut it and sew it.

On SOSOBROTHERS’ 33 oz. jacket—The Breaker of Arms (TBOA)—on every seam, fold and buttonhole, you have several layers of already extreme denim, folded by hand, passing under a needle.

The equipment has to be able to cope with it, but so does the operator. All heavyweight jackets from 20 oz. upwards are handled by one highly specialised maker, assisted by his wife. That means the 33 oz. jackets are competing for a very specific kind of production capacity.

Once the jacket leaves the sewing floor and arrives at your doorstep, it’s your turn to fight it.

What 33 oz. Is Like to Break In

Danno (@33oz_curls) bought a double-indigo TBOA to replace a worn-out work jacket. He put it on, buttoned it, soaked it while wearing it, and kept it on as it dried.

Wearing a short-sleeved tee underneath was a bad idea. As the denim dried and the elbow creases formed, the fabric rubbed his skin close to bleeding. For the first week, he switched to long sleeves and even a layer underneath.

He works for a municipal water department, so the jacket has gone down holes with him while he’s repaired pipes and hydrants, scraped against dirt walls and rubbed against old rusty pipework.

Once the main flex points were established, the jacket changed. “It feels like armour made just for you,” he says. His advice is equally subtle: “The more you wear it, the faster it breaks in. If you tiptoe around it, it will give you hell.”

By the time he bought The Breaker of Legs jeans, he knew what he was getting into. He wore long johns, soaked the jeans, worked the stubborn buttonholes open with a screwdriver and did enough squats to get the knees moving.

“You’ll need a wrench for the buttons unless you’re a sadist,” he says.

His experience shows what happens after the initial fight: the flex points settle in and the garment starts to shape itself around the wearer. He now compares the broken-in jacket to a heavy leather jacket.

Why the 20-Piece Cap Exists

The limitation on availability applies across the range of 33 oz. products. Once 20 pieces sell in a month, the range goes out of stock until the following month—or until further notice if supply requires it.

The number itself is a business decision, not a loom calculation. But slower weaving, high material loss, greater labour demand, specialist sewing capacity and uncertainty around future supply all make volume harder to manage.

For now, SOSOBROTHERS is working with the mill to find a way to keep the 33 oz. denim in production. The current stock comes from what may be the last couple of usable rolls, with no further production secured. That’s why availability will remain limited for the foreseeable future—and why there’s now a genuine question over whether The Breakers can continue once the existing denim is gone.

The post 33 oz. Denim Fights Back Long Before You Ever Wear It appeared first on Denimhunters.

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