Post Jeans Make The Jeans You Want To Wear
“…there's no secret to it. It's just iterative.”
Let’s finish up the week with our chat with Post Jeans - it’s a good one. Also, be sure to check out This or That with Traffic Skateboards on our Patreon.
If there’s one thing on which we can all agree in today’s incredibly fractured landscape of opinion, it’s that jeans are great to wear. They’re truly an integral piece of dressing, providing a pillar to build a look around, a reliable barrier from the elements and job site hazards, and a safe harbor of simple choice in a maelstrom of options.
So, if we can truly all agree that we like, need, and desire to wear jeans, why is everything else about them so divisive? What wash? How baggy? Inseam length? is raw denim still a ‘thing’? Are the jeans I truly love even in style anymore? People are set in their ways – everyone has their tried and true pair, and few of us agree on commonalities between them.
Being that nearly all specificities involved in jean selection constitute veritable lightning rods of opinion, why would anyone take it upon themselves to actually manufature jeans (in America, no less), especially considering the plethora of options that exist?
Well, Nick and Tom of Post Jeans are doing it, along with cutting out leather from the seats of Lexuses (Lexus? Lexi? What’s the brand-approved pluralization?) and using it on the jeans – read on for more on that, it’s next level. Why? Because it seems like fun, and, most importantly, because they can. Also...their jeans are comfortable enough to skate in. Wow.
So, why are you guys making pants?
Nicholas DiPastena: Pants are always changing, but they take up so much real estate on your body. They’re kind of the foundation of how you think about dressing.
Tom Wall: It's too easy to say we're just following what we like, but it really is true. When we first started out, I think we were just entering the super baggy phase. There was a line in the sand — are we going to be a trend-following company or are we going to do stuff that we think will be timeless and look good? We leaned into timeless design.
In the denim world, there's a lot of posturing around doing things the right way, or the old way. For us, if there isn't an exact reason for why that would make it into our pants, we don't really care about it. It's really about the end result and wearing something that we want to wear every day.
What’s the state of pants right now?
Nicholas DiPastena: We're in a period of transition, similar to what happened between the early 1990s and when Photosynthesis or Mosaic came out.
Fashion changed considerably. If you look at the Keenan [Milton] switch flip over the table, he’s wearing an oversized white t-shirt, baggy stonewashed jeans, and, I think, the Duffs KCK that looks like the Reebok Workout Plus shoe. There's this formula to how people looked in the ‘90s that I think has informed the way brands have been designing pants for the past five years. If you look at the Polar Big Boy or the 93, if you look at those Butter Goods jeans, you look at the Supreme Baggy Jean, there's a stonewash, early-mid ‘90s aesthetic, usually complemented with embroidery, that people have been emulating for a while. That’s kind of the uniform.
When you get into 1998, 1999, 2000, the aesthetic kind of modernized. People right now are thinking solely about the fit, but I think where things are changing is actually in the contrast and the materials and the way people wear clothes. In the late ‘90s, if you look at brands like Helmut Lang or APC, they're taking cues from military gear and they're incorporating darker denim.
I also think that you had talked about distressing. I recently watched that Violet video, THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, and everybody's wearing jeans with fucking holes in them. That was not the case five years ago.
I do think there's a world where jeans will get a little bit slimmer, but I don't think that we're going back to skinny jeans. Jeans were historically made for people working in mines and shit. You wore them on top of your clothes and they were only sold as raw jeans. I'm not saying that traditional raw denim is coming back, but I think the impressions we leave on our denim are going to become more relevant. I think people are going to start wearing clothes that have darker hues and a bit more contrast in comparison to the ‘90s playbook.
I don't know who's ready for raw denim to come back. That was a phase that was not that long ago.
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, absolutely. Brands like Planet Earth or Elwood or, later, KR3W and Altamont, they were not making medium-wash, stone-wash jeans. They were making brown, gray, dark blue jeans. None of those brands were making raw denim either, you know? So I actually don't think that raw denim in the way people wore it in 2012 is coming back. That was uncomfortable and way too fetishized — it was gross the way people had to have a recipe for their jeans to look a certain way.
I do think that jeans that have just been worn out will become popular again. That kid Kalman [Ocheltree], I think he skates for EDGLRD, or Sean Pablo or Troy [Gipson], all those guys wear them. Maybe some of them have pre-distressed jeans. But we're skaters, we should be able to wear our clothes out without worrying about selvedge denim. Having holes in your clothes can be cool as long as they're self-inflicted. I think people are just going to buy dark jeans and wear the shit out of them.
If you look at Yuto [Horigome} for instance, he wears the Supreme Rigid Baggy Jean. I saw Trung Nguyen recently in SoHo, and he was wearing these baggy, rinsed dark jeans. That’s so different from how people were wearing jeans a couple years ago. People now are open to being like, “I'm going to wear some darker clothes that are a bit more modern.”
Could it be fair to say that we're just seeing the results of the vibe shift in jeans now?
Nicholas DiPastena: I'm not saying that history is always repeating itself, but I think that there was an attitude shift from looking like a Huntington Beach reject to being a cool person who smokes and hangs out in New York and tries to date models. There was a change in skateboarding. And if you watch Photosynthesis, they're all wearing baggy clothes, but they look different.
It probably had to do with the millennium, and how things were changing in fashion and music, and skateboarding getting a little older. I think the way that people wear clothes has this tendency to go from super crisp and clean to, you know, maybe you wear them longer and you have more attitude. I think we're experiencing that right now. Clothes seem a bit more tattered now, they seem a little more worn in. They seem darker, there's more contrast.
Tom Wall: I think it's also just because people know more about clothes now. I think there was almost a delusion going on, like, “could I have worn this for five years or have I had this in my family for 40 years?” But now, people are well read, people know a lot about pants. So there's something to be said for honestly owning, like, this is an acid wash, or it’s raw denim, or a garment-dyed or over-dyed black or something like that.
Nicholas DiPastena: Our Legacy has intentionally distressed denim. They print the actual distressing on the denim and then sell a raw denim jean with printed distressing on it. Tom and I talked about this the other day: if you're trying to trick someone into thinking you got the holes in your jeans, that is not cool now. Imagine having a pair of raw selvedge jeans with distressing screen-printed onto them.
That’s, like, postmodernism in a garment.
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, and it's almost a deliberate acknowledgement that distressed jeans are lame — we're going to ironically distress these jeans like it has something to do with fashion. I think that the only other industry looking at that is skateboarding. Like, dude, Carpet has the same product — they came out with jeans that are distressed all the way down the leg. You could never distress your jeans that way.
Tom Wall: I actually would say the same thing about raw denim. We all are rejecting it because there's something a bit dishonest about wearing it. Wearing clothes that are comfortable and make you feel good is one of the mantras of our brand.
How do you encompass these philosophies in what you make?
Nicholas DiPastena: In everything we make, we want you to not have to think about it. We want you to just be able to wear it and feel amazing and wash it how you want and we want it to drape well and always look good. We wanted it to be for people who actually use the jeans versus people who are just obsessed with the denim industry. We wanted to do something that was simple and kind of universal.
There's this story about how Andrew Reynolds showed up to Baker Boys Distribution and every single person there had Dickies on, and he left immediately and bought Wranglers at Walmart and came back and felt more comfortable. I think skateboarders have this madness where in any other world, it would be the craziest thing ever for someone to act that way.
Are these pants made to skate in?
Nicholas DiPastena: I mean, we sell our jeans at stores like Understory or & son or Presidio Post, and they're carrying brands that are really nice.
I think there's a group of people that shop at these stores, and I'm a part of it — we grow up skateboarding, and we still appreciate some of the art and how skateboarders think about things. I think these stores and these brands provide a community for you to participate in that type of stuff, which is really awesome. Skateboarders love clothes.
The problem with a lot of brands is that they optimize for the fashion elements. We wanted to make something that you could actually put some work into. We want our jeans to drape well, we want them to be durable, we want them to follow the manufacturing principles, but we don't want people to have to read a book to maintain them.
Tom Wall: Typically in these boutiques, you're shopping around for really strong pieces, like big, colorful jackets, or bright shirts, things like that. We're very happy sort of being a base layer or a complement to those shirts that you wear once a week or the jacket that you wear once a week. We can be the everyday, reliable base layer.
Nicholas DiPastena: What's really cool about this industry right now is that I think in the past, there wasn't a consumer that graduated from buying skate brand clothing. And now, they're shopping at Evan Kinori or 18 East.
They're applying it to this adjacent industry, and they can be really authentic in that space by coming from a place like the skateboarding industry. What other industry has an entire clothing section to it?
Antonio [Ciongoli] at 18 East is an amazing example of someone who's from skateboarding, grew up watching The DC Video, and isn’t just ripping nostalgia. He's applying his own point of view with unique fabrics and manufacturing principles and he's creating an entire little world inside of this post-skateboarding community.
I’ve heard that the “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater generation” is still driving sales for skate brands, but they’re getting older. So it’s a smart place to be.
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, and I'm a part of that generation — I was born in 1992. Transworld i.e. was my first video. Baker 3 hit my middle school like a fucking freight train. I grew up with a ton of amazing brands that made product that was specifically marketed to like me — KR3W jeans, Emerica shoes, Emerica jeans. I remember an era where guys had to buy girls’ jeans so they could have tight pants if they didn't have money for KR3W jeans.
You actually had to think and care and observe and participate in these things.
Or at least knew who had a cool Tumblr. The actual search mechanisms just were not as sophisticated.
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, and those people are adults now and they're looking for brands and things to participate in that are actually cool.
They were marketed products made by people who were really thoughtful about them. Like, Jim Greco's KR3W jeans were fucking crazy. The polka dot pocket liners, deliberate distressing, boot fit. They were crazy.
If nothing else, he is beyond thoughtful about what he does. We've all seen his cinematic efforts.
Nicholas DiPastena: They're amazing. But yeah, skateboarders just want stuff to be into, and we want to make something that's really good that they can participate in.
What do you try to stay away from?
Tom Wall: One thing that turns me off consistently is there's a lot of white labeling going on. I think sometimes brands will only own the last five to 10 percent [of production]. Every brand might be somewhat guilty of that, but I like to see brands where the full product, front to back, is thought through by the creators.
If you're going to do what I'm talking about, only own the last mile of it, then at least own it and just say, this is what we're doing. But the whole reason we got into this in the first place is to make something from scratch.
Nicholas DiPastena: Totally. We were talking about buying girls’ jeans earlier — you actually couldn't find slim fit men's jeans in, like, 2003, 2004. Now everything is at your fingertips, and you could buy a pair of baggy jeans for $12 or you could buy a pair of baggy jeans for $2,000. And so the context and what goes into them matter more, because you can really get whatever you want.
What's really fun about making our jeans is that we touch every single part of it. We go to a place to buy the zippers, even the thread and the hardware, we want it to feel a certain way. Tom's sandblasting the hardware at his office, you know? And we're like at the factory, showing them, like, we want this this way.
I love the website that you guys have, it's like its own operating system. Deliberately clunky, kind of reminiscent of being on a Mac in the mid-90s.
Tom Wall: I'm working on a new one for the next release. We’re thinking that every time we do a big line rollout, doing a totally new website that matches it. Just to refresh and keep people on their toes. I feel like no one really does that with software, so it's kind of fun.
I'm looking at the Navy jeans. “This style was inspired by domestically made denim styles from the early 1990s.” Is there a tie-in there? Does the look of the site reference the era that inspired the jeans?
Tom Wall: A lot of our initial design for that first line is actually inspired by what was essentially the first Lexus, this early ‘90s Lexus.
We did an enormous amount of research. I had a vintage version of it as my first car. Nick and I are both from Arizona, and there's this early-90s suburban luxury thing that's associated with what we describe as tactileness — big round buttons and mahogany and leather with a Frank Lloyd Wright backdrop. The plushness of the ‘90s.
What was so cool about that car is it was more affordable to the middle class. I think its average price was like $38,000. And its competitors with all the same features were Mercedes and BMWs at like $80,000.
So for us, it was like, you can have these luxury items that feel really good in your jeans and not make any compromises, but that doesn't need to mean that your jeans are $500. That was what we really set out to achieve, and we have all these cheeky references to that car and the tactileness of those big clunky buttons. If you look at our first tag, it's a drawing that one of our illustrator friends did of the dashboard of that car. We even rented one for our first photoshoot.
Nicholas DiPastena: Or if you look at the hotel in the movie Lost in Translation, there's this upper class consumerism, it’s sophisticated, but it's not the way luxury is portrayed today. It’s designed well and there was a lot of thought put into it, but it’s also durable.
It reminds me of our name, Post, which references the era after jeans were being made in the United States — the post-jeans era. If you look at the Lexus, that was a product of Japanese designers observing American culture in California, similar to what Japanese clothing designers have done with denim.
Tom Wall: Now, in the denim and fashion world, we're looking at Japan.
Reminds me of Take Ivy.
Nicholas DiPastena: Or that book Ametora.
Tell me about how you go about selecting materials and actually making the jeans.
Nicholas DiPastena: So first, with the jeans, we wanted to make something that you have to touch and feel and see to understand. You need to work with unique materials. You need to work with factories that really have attention to detail. And every piece needs to be really thought out. With jeans, you can actually still do that in the United States.
The first run of jeans, it was really important for us to have a heritage style that draped really well. We spent a ton of time going back and forth looking at different mills, and we ultimately landed on this really unique mill that basically makes military fabrics. They have, I think, a hundred-year contract where if we enter into a civil war, they're going to make jackets and pants and stuff for us. But they produce a small amount of fabric for the fashion industry, and we thought that that fabric was really unique, and representative of some of the over-dyed twill styles that were made in the United States in the early 1990s.
It's all made domestically and they're all products where we had a hand in making sure that they fit the aesthetic. This style in particular is really designed to be our standard fit. It's a relaxed style. We offer it in two different colors, so an over-dye navy and then also a natural that's been washed.
Also, the tags are really cool. They're illustrated by a guy named Clay Halling, who is actually an illustrator for Deluxe. He does a lot of graphics for Spitfire and Antihero, and he's a childhood friend of ours. Even down to the flasher, the tag on the back, the type of paper that we used is an archival paper. It's screen printed using an older technique.
Tom Wall: We learned after the first run. Like with the buttons, we learned it takes six weeks of lead time, so that gives us three weeks to experiment with the finishing on the buttons. That was like one of my experiments this time around — I work next to a metal shop and every day for a few weeks, I was in there being like, well, what if we added this auto paint? What if we powder coated it? What if we used galvanized steel? What's going to hold up in the wash?
How long have you guys been doing this? You said you’re getting ready to do your second run, right?
Tom Wall: It’s been like two and a half years since we first started.
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, and we'll keep re-upping the first fit and have it always available in that fabric. The new run is a slightly looser fit with a heavier, more rugged fabric, and it includes a bunch of new details — sandblasted hardware, new thread, and we found a bunch of Lexus LS400s in a junkyard and ripped out the leather seats and used that leather to make the patches on the back of the jeans. So there’s no branding on the patches, and each one is a little different.
Tom Wall: In that same metalworking shop, we have a CNC attached to a laser cutter. We ordered a bunch of sheet metal, and we're going to be laser cutting our logo out of a piece of sheet metal and then sandblasting that for the hang tags.
Nicholas DiPastena: Tom and I are making this shit ourselves. Each thing is touched by us. Because of that, it just means more and it feels like more.
What turned this from a concept into a reality?
Tom Wall: The first run was kind of a lot of like, “let's interview five or six factories. Let's go feel a bunch of fabric.” Then we had a bunch of surprises and we really just went head first.
We spent money on a bunch of samples that didn't turn out right. We changed factories. There’s no online school — we had to show up at the factory, get a tour of it, have them make a sample, see if we like the sample. Same thing goes for the fabric. Same thing goes for the hardware. We just got burned a lot at first.
By the second run, we know it's takes six weeks for production. Three weeks in, they're going to expect the buttons, we're have to order from this part of YKK that only isn't available on Fridays. I'm sure that our third run is going to have the same experience, and we'll be that much better at it. But there's no secret to it. It's just iterative.
It seems like everyone is competing against Temu — does that exist for jeans?
Nicholas DiPastena: Yeah, it definitely does. We met this one guy who makes jeans who was like, “Alright, they're $30 a pair. You pay me, I get them made in Bangladesh or wherever, and then they get shipped to your house.” And you don't know anything about it.
This factory that we're working with in SF, they haven't made jeans since the ‘90s. We went down there with my friend who's a technical denim designer, and he went down there with me. We looked at all the machines, we did a sample to see if it met the quality standards.
Finding people that make jeans is fucking hard, and it's really cool when you make a connection with somebody and become friends with these people. Johnny, the 60-year old guy who makes these jeans in the basement in San Francisco.
He’s a collector of jeans — he had an original buckle back pair of Levi 501s — and he really wanted to make them. So he needed somebody who was motivated by the same thing. You can only get that through going down there and meeting with these people. There's no website.
Tom Wall: The names are always, like, “National Apparel” and “California Garments.” There's no way you would even find them on the internet.
Have you thought about trying to scale this whole thing?
Tom Wall: Yeah, I mean, we would love to get there through bootstrapping and growing slowly. The other route is to go out and raise money. I think Nick will and I would like to put that off for as long as possible, but there is this hard reality for people with full staffs that are selling a few thousand pairs a year. At that stage, yeah, there's just a lot of upfront capital and a lot of marketing costs. And that’s the least interesting part for us, is running Instagram ads.
We try to do none of that right now. It's all word of mouth, and we're just seeing where that takes us.
Nicholas DiPastena: Working with retailers who text you and tell you how it went when they sell a pair of pants means a lot more to me than actually running this as our lifeblood.
Tom Wall: I also think that, you know, it would be pretty nice if a big department store hit us up and put in an order for a thousand jeans, but then you're dealing with those margin problems that Nick and I were talking about earlier, and a lot of people are willing to work with us on consignment right now. It's just easier to deal with, and it creates a lot of creative liberty when cost is the last thing on our mind.
Check out the new pants from Post, the 1062 online or in person at Understory or & son or Presidio Post.