What Nobody Tells You Before You Buy orSlow Selvedge Jeans

A lot of people find us through a photo of a great fade and buy their first pair without knowing much beyond that. That’s fine. But a few things about how we build our jeans change how that first pair actually feels, fits, and wears in, and most of it never makes it into a product description. Here’s what we’d tell you if you asked us directly.

Our Sizing Doesn’t Work Like a Normal Waist Number

We size our jeans on a scale of 0 through 5, not standard waist inches like 32 or 34. That trips up almost every first-time buyer, and it’s worth understanding before you guess based on whatever size you usually wear. A size 2 sits close to a 31 to 32 inch waist in our 105, but the exact number shifts slightly depending on the cut and the wash. Check the actual measurements for the specific style you want rather than assuming your usual number carries over. And size snug, not loose. Our fabric is woven at a lower tension than most modern denim, which means it stretches with wear, sometimes by close to an inch at the waist. Buy loose expecting a break-in the way you would with stiffer raw denim from other brands, and the fit loosens up more than you want within a month.

Our Denim Comes Off Vintage Looms on Purpose

Our 13.5oz selvedge denim is proprietary to us, and we weave it at a lower tension than most modern mills use. That’s a deliberate choice, not a cost decision. Lower tension gives the fabric a soft hand and a slightly uneven, slubby texture right off the bolt, which is closer to how denim moved and felt before high-speed modern looms took over. We sew most of our garments in Kurashiki, in the Okayama Prefecture, using vintage Union Special, Singer, and Reece machines that our team maintains by hand. Those older machines don’t produce an identical result every time. Small variations show up from piece to piece, and we’ve come to see those irregularities as part of what makes the fabric and the construction feel honest instead of mass-produced. If you’re expecting perfectly uniform stitching on every pair, that’s not really what we’re going for.

Raw Isn’t the Only Way to Get Real Fades

New buyers sometimes assume raw denim is the only path to a genuine fade, and skip our one wash and two year wash options because of it. That’s not quite right. Raw denim holds the most indigo and produces the highest contrast fades, but it also comes stiff, and unsanforized raw denim can shrink significantly on the first soak. Our one wash denim finish handles that shrinkage ahead of time and softens the hand, so the jeans fit close to true size from day one and still develop honeycombs, whiskers, and fading with regular wear. The contrast just builds from a slightly lighter starting point than raw. Our two year wash is a different approach entirely. We built that finish by studying worn samples from Ichiro Nakatsu’s own vintage collection and recreating that specific fade pattern in the factory, rather than distressing the fabric with a generic tumble. It gives you the look of years of wear immediately, though it won’t change as dramatically from here since most of the fading is already built in.

The Rise Feels Different Than Modern Denim on Purpose

If you’ve mostly worn low-rise or mid-rise jeans, our Orslow 105 can feel high at first. That’s not a fit mistake on our end. We build the 105 off Industrial Era five-pocket jeans, the same family of cuts that produced early Levi’s 501s, and that older pattern carries a rise that sits higher through the waist with a fuller cut through the seat and thigh. Give it more than one wear before deciding it’s wrong. The fit isn’t loose so much as it’s accurate to a shape that was built for movement, not for a slim modern silhouette. If the fuller cut isn’t for you, our 107 tapers more through the knee and ankle for a slimmer finish while keeping the same fabric and general philosophy.

We Don’t Redesign the Pattern Every Season

Some buyers expect a brand’s signature fit to shift every year or two, the way a lot of fashion denim does. Ours doesn’t. We’ve kept our core patterns, like the 105, largely unchanged for years, because we treat the fit itself as the finished product rather than something to tweak for a trend cycle. That means a pair you buy from us today should still make sense next to a pair you bought years ago. Same rise, same top block, same taper. Only the wash changes.

The Bottom Line

Buying your first pair from us goes smoother once you know the sizing runs on our own scale, the fabric is meant to move and fade rather than stay perfectly uniform, and the fit is pulled straight from mid-century patterns rather than modern sizing trends. Check the measurements, pick raw or a wash based on how much of the fading process you want to be part of, and browse the full range at orslow.co once you know what you’re looking for.