23 May 2022. We press the button that sends out the newsletter announcing the launch of our men’s blue jeans. At first sight, nothing revolutionary for a clothing brand. Except that these jeans are a bit special: they should take longer than most to wear through at the crotch. Getting there took us three years, a brand-new wear test invented with our laboratory, and, in the end, our own fabric developed in the Vosges mountains, in eastern France. Come along for the ride.

Crotch holes: the curse of jeans

Before we started making our jeans, we sent you a short questionnaire: “What’s the problem with your jeans, generally speaking?”. Simple question, simple answer: the problem is holes at the crotch.

Yes: when you walk, one thigh rubs against the other (or rather, against the bottom of the buttock), which weakens the denim and eventually wears a hole in it.

So before making ours, we first had to understand why some jeans wear through faster than others. Our first reflex: trawl through the hundreds of articles online about the “crotch blow out” (that’s what they call a crotch hole in the homeland of jeans) and its cause – or causes. But on American sites and forums, nobody agreed: fabric too thin, elastane, poor-quality cotton, cut too tight, seams too thick, moisture from sweat…

So… how do we get to the bottom of this?

One day, we had a revelation: the truth about holes in jeans was most probably hiding… in chinos. Think about it: we’ve been selling our Loom chinos since 2019 and we’re sure of one thing: we’ve had almost no reports of crotch holes, and the rare customers who did wear through that area are heavy cyclists or motorbike riders. In short, our chinos don’t wear through from the rubbing of walking.

So the question was simply this: what is different about jeans compared to chinos that could explain the holes at the crotch?

Looking for the culprit

This question let us rule out most of the theories found on those American sites:

• Jeans wear through because they are too thin: no, chinos are generally thinner than jeans.
• Jeans wear through because they are too tight around the thighs: no, at the crotch, jeans and chinos have more or less the same cut.
• Jeans wear through because of outside factors (moisture from sweat, strain when you move…): no, in principle you do pretty much the same things in jeans as in chinos.
• Jeans wear through because they contain elastane: no, like most jeans, most chinos contain a small percentage of elastane for comfort.
• Jeans wear through because their cotton is poor quality: no, there is no reason why the cotton fibres used in jeans should be shorter or worse than those used in chinos.
• Jeans wear through because their yarns are lower quality: no. It’s true that in the 70s, some jeans were woven with so-called “open-end” yarns (cheaper and possibly less resistant to abrasion), but today 95% of jeans are woven with traditional “ringspun” yarns, just like chinos.

That left us with just two theories to test:

Theory no. 1: the double seam. The inner leg seam of jeans is thicker than on chinos – a double seam that could cause more rubbing than on chinos.

Theory no. 2: roughness. The yarns in jeans are thicker than those in chinos, so the fabric is rougher. When one thigh rubs against the other, it’s a bit like sandpaper rubbing against the fabric.

Our laboratory tests

To test our theories, we decided to simulate the rubbing with our laboratory (SMT), using a so-called “Martindale” test: a machine rubs the fabric until a hole appears. The result is a number of cycles: the higher the number, the more resistant the fabric.

First, we wanted to check that the Martindale test really does simulate what happens in real life. So we tested a denim fabric and a chino fabric, to confirm that in the lab too, the denim wears through faster than the chino.

But when the results came in, surprise: in the lab, the denim had lasted twice as long as the chino (100,000 vs. 50,000 cycles). The opposite of what happens in real life…

So we thought about it for a couple of seconds (ok, more like a couple of weeks): this Martindale test can’t simulate what really happens at the crotch, because it uses the same standard material to rub against the fabric every time. But when you walk, the fabric rubs against itself! We called our lab and together came up with a different kind of test, replacing the standard “abrasive wool” with the fabric itself. After a few adjustments to get the pressure right, the test was christened with the catchy name “Abrasion resistance of fabrics, modified Martindale method, fabric against fabric, 12 kPa pressure”.

A few days later, the results of the new test came in:

Bingo! We had found a lab test that reflects what happens in real life: chino fabric resists rubbing (at least) three times better than denim: 100,000 vs. 35,000 cycles.

So we could move on to the next step: testing our two theories to find the cause of those unwelcome holes in your jeans.

To test the first theory (the double seam), we swapped the plain fabric on the Martindale machine for a piece of fabric with a seam in it… When the results came back, we saw that it changed nothing: the seam does not weaken the fabric. Found not guilty.

By elimination, that left only one possible culprit: roughness. To check this theory, we had several types of jeans tested: some fairly smooth, some fairly rough. And every result confirmed it: the thicker and rougher the denim, the faster it wears through:

• The thinnest jeans we could find (from Muji) held up extremely well: they sailed past 100,000 cycles.
• A fairly thick pair of raw jeans (from Uniqlo) didn’t do so well: 35,000 cycles. But when we smoothed the fabric down by hand with sandpaper before sending it for testing, it held up much better and also passed 100,000 cycles!
• A fairly rough pair of jeans made with “open-end” yarn didn’t hold up well at all: just 16,000 cycles.
• A pair of raw jeans and its washed (and therefore less rough) equivalent:  the first lasted 70,000 cycles, far less than the second, which gave way at 100,000 cycles.

Long story short: after several months of trials (and a few thousand euros spent…), we had finally identified the culprit: roughness. Exactly the opposite of what intuition would suggest: a thick cowboy-style pair of jeans is likely to wear through at the crotch faster than a thin, lightweight pair.

Now all that was left was to develop our fabric. We had two options.

1. Test loads of existing fabrics from suppliers and pick the best one.
2. Develop our own: less certain, slower, more expensive… but with the hope of creating a fabric that might outperform anything already out there!

You can already guess which one we chose, can’t you?

Off to the Vosges

Finding a mill willing to take on this kind of development with us was no easy task. It costs time and money, and we’re not Levi’s. At the outset, we were hoping to order at most 10,000 metres of fabric a year, or a little over €100,000…  Not very interesting, financially, for a manufacturer.

And yet Tissage de France, the mill in the Vosges that weaves the denim for the brand 1083, agreed straight away to work with us on the project. The deal: we share the development costs, and if it works, the mill can _{reuse everything we learned together} in other projects with other customers (which is exactly what we had done, successfully, when we developed our socks).

To develop a denim that isn’t too rough but still has a nice, sturdy hand, we decided together to weave:

• A denim that isn’t too thick (12 oz weight),
• ... with a so-called “ringspun” yarn (softer than its “open-end” equivalent),
• ... spun from combed cotton (with the shortest fibres removed for extra softness and strength, something normally reserved for t-shirts or shirts, where softness is what you’re after)
• ... and all of it in organic cotton, of course.

But we didn’t stop there. We also wanted to solve the second big problem raised in our questionnaire: jeans that stretch out and end up a size too big. For that, instead of spinning the elastane together with the cotton fibres (the classic “corespun” method), Denis, the mill’s manager, recommended twisting two cotton yarns around an elastane filament (the “covered” method, more expensive but in principle more effective).

It took us a few trials to make the final adjustments (notably to the size of the elastane thread), and finally: we had woven a denim that holds up. The proof:

• On the test we invented (fabric-against-fabric abrasion), our jeans pass 200,000 cycles! That’s more than any of the jeans we tested.
• On the residual deformation test, residual stretch after 1 minute is only 1.8%, which is perfectly respectable: of the 6 other jeans we tested, only one did better.

Right, but a denim that’s tough and ugly isn’t much use, is it? Good news: our fabric looks like this:

In the pocket

With the fabric developed, the hardest part was done. Because when it came to making the jeans, we knew exactly who to call: 5D, our brilliant Portuguese factory, a trousers specialist (which also makes clothes for plenty of great French brands).

Compared with the fabric, our brief for the making-up was fairly simple… We wanted:

• A semi-slim cut.
• Pockets deep enough for your phone and strong enough for your keys.
• A zip fly, because it’s more practical and fades more nicely.
• A first pre-wash on the raw denim so it doesn’t shrink at home.
• Reinforced belt loops.

After a bit of back and forth on the cut, we had our jeans! Good-looking, comfortable and tough. Time for the first production run.

A quick aside: ouch, the price
We sell these jeans for €100. Yes, that’s not cheap… but it’s not as expensive as it looks.
First, the development phase cost us a fair amount of money: between the lab tests, the weaving trials and the back and forth on prototypes, we spent around ten thousand euros (not counting our own working time).
Second, the fabric costs about €15/m to produce, almost twice the price of classic made-in-Italy denim: organic cotton, ringspun yarn, combed cotton, covered rather than corespun elastane, made in France… our ethics and our quality choices come at a cost.
Finally, the making-up is careful and done in Portugal, with wages far higher than those behind 95% of the jeans on the market, most of which are made in Asia or North Africa.
But because we do no collections, no sales and no advertising, and our shareholders don’t push us to make a fat margin (more details here), we sell them for “only” 100 euros (for now – this price may change with inflation on energy and raw materials).

Tough, but not indestructible

It’s been almost a year since we launched these jeans, so we’re starting to get some perspective on how they age. First, the people who bought them seem very happy: they’re rated 4.7/5 by more than 100 people, which is truly great.

Will these jeans resist crotch holes for all eternity?

No.

First, out of more than 2000 pairs sold, we’ve already had 3 reports of holes: from people who regularly cycle or ride a motorbike. We designed these jeans to stand up well to “thigh against thigh” rubbing… but they won’t be much more resistant than other jeans to “thigh against saddle” rubbing (although every time, the customers concerned told us their Loom jeans had lasted longer than their other jeans).

And even with the rubbing of ordinary walking, while they will probably last longer than average, it’s very likely that one day they too will wear through. In short, like any garment made of natural fibres, these jeans will eventually wear out.

Could we make an even more resistant pair of jeans?

Not without using a lot of synthetic materials: the simplest way to make a garment more resistant is still to replace cotton with polyester. The problems:  it isn’t pleasant to wear, it holds on to odours and, above all, we think fashion urgently needs to kick its plastic addiction (we talk about it in this article).

Are these holes really such a big deal?

Not really. Because like any garment, jeans can be repaired. In fact, jeans are even easier to repair than other clothes. For a start, their mix of blue and white yarns means they aren’t visually uniform… so repairs can be almost invisible. For crotch holes, you can add a patch of fabric inside the jeans behind the hole, then stitch it down with thread of the right colour… And here is the result:

Besides, even if the repair shows a little, it’s no tragedy: denim experts consider that what makes a pair of jeans beautiful is the marks of what it has lived through. The fading (we wrote a whole article on the subject), the snags, the repairs – in short, the “patina” – are all scars that add value. So much so that plenty of brands try to reproduce them artificially in the factory.

Conclusion: let’s pick the right battle

If our jeans will wear out in the end, and holes are relatively easy to repair, was it worth going to all that trouble?

We hope so: if the first crotch hole appears a year or two later than usual, that’s still a win. And to develop these jeans, we had to understand the science behind clothes, which is something we really love. Finally, supporting French factories by doing R&D with them is a mission we find both worthwhile and exciting.

But let’s be clear-headed: the garment that never wears out doesn’t exist… and never will. The most important thing for keeping a garment a long time isn’t its built-in quality: it’s mostly how you look after it. Our grandparents’ clothes were probably far less resistant than today’s. Yet they kept them much longer. Because they knew how to care for them, repair them and mend them.

Now it’s our turn to relearn, together, how to look after our clothes. Tucking in a napkin before eating pasta with tomato sauce, shaving the pilling off our sweaters or socks, washing wool sweaters gently, sewing buttons back on, fixing snags… and mending the crotch holes in our jeans.

In short, clothes that last a long time are above all clothes that age well.

Let’s buy fewer of them, and take care of them.

Update, March 2024

• The fabric for these jeans is now woven in Italy (no longer in France). Sadly, in France the minimum order quantities were too high and the production lead times too long for us. In a difficult period for ethical brands, and with our cash reserves limited, we opted for an Italian denim (from Candiani, a well-known weaver). To keep a fabric that resists crotch holes for as long as our French one, we put several through the abrasion test we had invented with our laboratory (more details here). We hope to be able to go back to our French fabric one day.
• The Italian fabric is roughly the same weight as the French one. It is slightly stretchier, which makes it a little more comfortable and means it loosens up a bit more as you wear it.
• One advantage of Italian know-how: the raw colour no longer bleeds

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Who are we to say this?
You’re reading La Mode à l’Envers, a blog run by the clothing brand Loom. The textile industry is coming apart at the seams, and the planet is footing the bill. So whatever we manage to understand about this industry, we try to explain here. Because making clothes that last is good, but revealing, sharing and inspiring is even more powerful.
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