Tailoring isn't only suits. It's less common to be asked to make bespoke jeans, but once in a while we get the request. Like suits, bespoke jeans are pricey. We have spoken to a couple of brands and we're finding made-to-measure costs from £200 to over £475. Like getting your car fixed where the labour costs more than the replacement part, so it is with employing a tailor. We can't promise to undercut these prices, but we can promise you control and design choices the others cannot.
Jeans are one of the most commonly complained about items when people go shopping for off-the-peg clothing. They struggle to get the right fit, colour & style. For some years now the only option on sale for men's jeans has been skinny. It makes your feet look bigger. There was also the 'hipster' trend of a couple of years back, now slowly receding, with massive turn-ups on the trouser bottoms. Sold to us as 'workwear' this is actually American workwear and did not feature in history of British Industry and to us, always felt inauthentic.
Like suits, there is much enjoyment to be had in specifying what you want and almost everything is up for grabs: the colour and origin of the denim itself, the colour of the stitching thread, pocket embroidery, number and depth of pockets, number of belt loops, the rivets. Our client came to us with some specifics: he didn't want to look like he just stepped out of an Oregon sawmill so didn't want turn-ups. He did want a very dark shade of indigo and most important of all he wanted bootcuts which he couldn't find in a shop anywhere. He brought with him an off-the-peg pair from a very famous high-street brand that you will have heard of, but that they no longer sell, asking for us to replicate the bootcut but increase the rise i.e. where the waistband sits.
There are certain challenges to making denim jeans. They shrink at the first wash but then relax and stretch out again on wearing, making it more difficult to cut the correct size if you don't know how denim behaves.
There is sanforised and unsanforised denim. The difference being sanforised denim is pre-washed and doesn’t shrink as much; we put a length of cloth to a test and found it had shrunk just 1%. Unsanforised is not pre-washed so can shrink by up to 10%.
To eliminate this uncertainty we prefer to use sanforised denim in our atelier, pre-washing it one more time ourselves before cutting, so we can calculate the shrinkage precisely and advise the customer of what they can expect when washing at home.
We also found some dark-blue Japanese selvedge denim.
Selvedge means self-edged and refers to the two edges of the fabric in which the crosswise threads on the loom are not cut, but turned around and woven back across to the other side.
Japanese selvedge is something denim-heads obsess over. Traditional Japanese looms were 80cm wide, half the width of more modern 150cm looms, resulting in more wastage when cutting the parts out from which the jeans are made.
Finally, Japanese selvedge uses natural indigo, not modern synthetic dye and is woven more slowly on 20th Century looms that are either irreplaceable or difficult to maintain. Often Japanese mills include a few strands of coloured thread down one edge of the warp and enthusiasts like this stripe visible somewhere in the finished jeans, most often in the trouser cuff at the bottom. All these things make authentic Japanese denim more expensive per metre. Whilst we're doing history, the word denim comes from de Nimes in that they were first woven in the French city of Nîmes.
So we gave the customer a pair of bootcut jeans in Japanese selvedge denim, slim through the thigh then a slight flare from the knee, with a higher rise at the back, in a classic 5-pocket style but with six belt loops instead of the conventional five. We cut the coin pocket and one belt-loop around the back with the red selvedge stripe; a nice and discrete little touch.
At the beginning the client had no strict ideas on the embroidery for the back pockets, only an idea for waves and the sea. We created two options which client approved and decided to have them both, one on each pocket. So each rear pocket is different and have been hand-embroided; true bespoke service.
Another departure from conventional off-the-peg is where jeans normally have orange contrast stitching, the client wanted something a little less loud, so we agreed on a blue instead; another subtle link to the sea.
It appears the fashion industry is toying with the idea of bootcut jeans again, so our client was a little ahead of the game. They've been appearing on catwalks for Autumn/Winter 2025 and Spring/Summer 2025 but you can't find a decent pair on the high street. Kendrick Lamar’s bootcut jeans caused some stir at his Super Bowl half-time performance but check the picture - those are flares, more like Robert Plant at Earl's Court 1975.
Bootcuts are more discrete and to a casual glance you might not even notice they are wider at the cuff than the knee. If you have chelsea boots then this is as much as you need. We like bootcuts because they visually enhance a man's silhouette by counter-balancing his shoulder width so he doesn't look like an inverted triangle, which is what skinny jeans do.
Menswear tends to move slowly and few men want to stand out by suddenly wearing something so eye-catching.
Analytics platform Heuritech predicts sales of wide-leg jeans will decline 3% over the next year, while slim and straight-leg jeans are expected to grow by the same amount. Vogue reports searches for men’s flared and bootcut jeans have increased 12% on their website over the past three months. So a shift appears to be going on.
There’s nothing quite like a garment that has been designed specifically for you. When you plan the next item to add to your wardrobe, you can be assured that we will listen to your requirements and fulfil the order the best way it can be.
Cutting and making everything in-house in our studio in Aberdeen, we have flexibility to deal with the orders that other tailors may find less straightforward.
Our tailored jeans are available starting from £350, fully customised. Book an appointment by email to tailor@buttonstance.com if you're interested.
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