At a textile mill in Wakayama, Japan, somebody has found an unusual job for a milk bottle.
First, it’s filled with lubricant. Calm down, we’re talking about knitwear. Then a cloth-wrapped rod draws the oil toward the yarn, helping it move through a ceiling-suspended knitting machine. It’s one of the ways workers at Kanekichi keep the old equipment running. The machine produces about a meter of fabric an hour, which is either a testament to Japanese craftsmanship or a middle finger to the Industrial Revolution. Possibly both.
In an industry built on getting more clothes out the door for less money, this sounds like a machine begging to be replaced. Instead, people have spent decades figuring out how to keep it alive.
And now it has helped produce a Levi’s jacket without denim.
The Machines Japan Wouldn’t Throw Away
The method is called tsuriami, and the machines are tsuriamiki, a Japanese term referring to how they’re suspended overhead. They turn slowly, allowing yarn to feed with little tension. The resulting cotton knit has the soft, substantial character that makes a good sweatshirt something you guard against roommates and careless laundry practices.
Circular knitting equipment arrived in Japan from Europe in the early 1900s. By the 1960s, manufacturers increasingly favored faster alternatives. Most of the old machines disappeared. In Wakayama, two factories still operate them, according to LOOPWHEELER. The company says about 200 remain in use there.
LOOPWHEELER founder Satoshi Suzuki established the brand in 1999 partly to ensure that the machinery, and the knowledge required to operate it, didn’t vanish. In other words, he saw a future in a textile technology modern manufacturing had essentially given up on.
This corrects the idea that progress always arrives with a touchscreen.
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Japan’s Long Love Affair With American Jeans
The connection to Levi’s is less random than it first appears. For generations, Japanese collectors and clothing makers have studied American workwear with an enthusiasm that can make the average American jeans owner seem criminally incurious. Vintage Levi’s became prized objects. Their cuts, stitching, and fading patterns became subjects of serious study. Japanese makers eventually developed their own formidable reputation for denim.
Clothes designed for American laborers became objects of near-scholarly attention in Japan. Now a Japanese specialist in decidedly non-denim fabric is helping the American original reconsider what its workwear ought to feel like.
BEAMS, the Japanese retailer celebrating its 50th anniversary, brought the parties together. The new six-piece collection combines Levi’s familiar Type I jacket and five-pocket pants with LOOPWHEELER’s cotton knit, reworked in the oversized proportions BEAMS favors. It comes in heather gray and navy, with two vintage-inspired bandanas completing the lineup.
The challenge wasn’t just putting the new fabric into an old pattern. Denim holds its shape; sweatshirt material prefers gravity. In a behind-the-scenes account published by BEAMS, the designers describe how early versions of the already enormous jacket drooped too much. Fixing it required repeated adjustments, some measured in millimeters.
They even worked to preserve the resistance of a new denim jacket’s buttons. Three companies went to considerable trouble to make a sweatshirt jacket, then made sure part of it was still mildly annoying to fasten. Fashion may be ridiculous, but this ridiculousness seemed to require an engineering degree.
When Can You Buy It?
The collection launched in select Japanese BEAMS stores on October 17. BEAMS lists an international release through Levi’s channels on October 22, followed by BEAMS America on October 23.
None of this means you need to replace your old denim jacket. A premium-priced sweatshirt disguised as workwear won’t settle any arguments about fashion’s excesses.
The brand collaboration got our attention, but it’s the chain of people who kept an inconvenient skill alive long enough for a 19th-century American clothing company to find a new use for it.
The denim is missing. The craftsmanship is not.
