Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the peak #menswear era, J.Crew was a destination for denim. The New York brand helped introduce Japanese denim to the masses and sold the best jeans of any large American brand at the time.
The top-shelf stuff came under the Wallace & Barnes label, which often used American White Oak denim and was manufactured domestically. But the standard J.Crew jeans back then were made with Japan’s Kaihara Denim.
Kaihara Mill was founded in 1893 in Fukuyama, Japan, and accounts for almost half of Japan’s denim production. It may not command the prestige of boutique brands like Blue Blue, Oni and Samurai, but it is arguably the top mill that can operate on the scale required by brands like J.Crew, Lee and even Levi’s.
J.Crew stopped sourcing denim from Kaihara in the late 2010s after the Men’s Creative Director and CEO exited, but another major American clothing brand has been utilizing the Japanese denim for years.
Lee, one of the oldest and most storied names in American jeans, uses Kaihara for its Lee 101 collection, a criminally underrated source of affordable top-shelf denim. Now, J.Crew has reunited with its old indigo associate by way of a collaboration with Lee.
The men’s half of the J.Crew x Lee collaboration consists of only three items, but they are all hits. There is a 1970s-inspired straight-leg jean, a hybrid of an Oxford cloth button-down and a pearl-snap western shirt, and Lee’s classic Storm Rider denim jacket with a J.Crew twist.
