The business of denim repair

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Rawdenim and denim repair is a real thing. I am wear selvage denim almost daily. I basically have a hobby that is about wearing pants. Join us at www.reddit.com/r/rawdenim, we are really nice, I swear.

Personally I hate jeans. Maybe it’s because I have big thighs, I don’t know - that and I don’t like to wear tight things. I made it 34 years without ever owning a pair. Now I wear them to work and they get washed once a week, but then again they were $20 and I wear through a pair in about a year (industrial manufacturing, lots of oil, grease, dirt, and grim. I also go through one of those industrial boxes of Oxiclean from Sam’s in a year.)

Repair? What is this repair you speak of? Has Nieman-Marcus run out of D&G’s?

I have a pair of Italian jeans given to me for my birthday about 20 years ago. They were fantastic - truly fantastic - but have sad crotch-epidemic holes now. I cannot wear them.

If anyone knows of denim repair in London, England, please let me know, so that these jeans can continue to share my journey through vivid life.

Given that a pair of decent jeans costs as much as a used sewing machine, you’d think that a few more hipster jeans wearers would go into the repair business.

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Heh. Sixty dollar jeans are considered inexpensive? I figure the damn things are going to wear out anyway, and end up buying Wranglers, or the Costco brand. For more durable pantses that are wearable to the office I get Carhardt.

I recently lost enough weight to have to replace a considerable part of my wardrobe, so I’m open to change, but still, cheap habits die hard.

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I wear Levis, which set me back less than sixty, as they’re usually on sale at the local old-line department store. They last for years. I’m one of those rare souls who usually wears out the left knee (never the right) instead of the other place.

The advantage of being an engineer is that two hundred dollar pants don’t work better than the more generic ones, so lots of money is saved for more important things.

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I’ve been really surprised with the good quality and color stay of the pair of black Kirkland (Costco’s house brand) jeans I got a few years ago.

Failure of the crotch is the story of my life :frowning:

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My grandma always zipped the jeans before putting them in the washer, and was adamant that any of us helping with laundry should pull them out by the waist, never the leg.

I decided to try it. It seems to work for stopping the crotch holes–the last half-dozen pairs I retired were faded and/or fraying badly at the hems, but were otherwise fine.

I had the same problem when I last wore jeans regularly, which was over twenty years ago. Jeans that were barely starting to show wear anywhere else were wearing through at the crotch. I switched to Dockers, and realized that I’d been torturing myself with pants that were unbelievably stiff when new, hot in summer, very uncomfortable when wet, and overall of no use past my teen years, when they were the virtually-manditory uniform of my generation. Denim jeans were state-of-the-art clothing for mid-nineteenth-century prospectors, and are now mostly for nostalgia.

I second this.

Also, a sewing machine is a Very Good asset to have; often things you want aren’t on the market at all, or the choice is grossly limited. Want a pocket of an exact size at an exact place? Either spend lots and lots of time shopping and then ending up with overpriced thing that is considerably off-spec, or buy some cheapo close-enough and sew in the mods in time shorter than what would be spent going through the offers and shops.

There is also the possibility of preventive maintenance. You can strengthen the parts that will wear over time, while they are still intact.

Me too! What the hell is that? I can’t figure out what my left knee does differently than my right — I don’t cross my legs always right-over-left, and I’m not in the habit of genuflecting or getting knighted or racing motorcycles on an oval track.

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Huh. I figured this was a fact known to anyone who made a habit of wearing pants, jeans or otherwise.

there’s an old school mending tailor’s shop on Kilburn High Road, opposite the train station. the gentleman there will most certainly be able to address your crotch problem.

Good point - old school tailors. I’ve got a few nearby - guess I don’t need to be overly hipster about who repairs my crotch epidemic.

Maybe a free clinic would be a better choice than a tailor.

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