INTRODUCING: RICK OWENS DRKSHDW JAPANESE DENIM PROJECT
DESIGNER FEATURES - Sept 24, 2021
Owens’ new Japanese denim project takes his obsession with denim to a whole new level.
Like leather, denim has always played a prominent role in Rick Owens’s body of work, harking back to his roots as a goth urchin who prowled the Los Angeles nightclubs. His jeans have long been a staple amongst his diehard fans. Owens has experimented with denim in various ways – bleaching, dyeing, destroying, and reworking it. He has worked with the best of Italian denim mills and the American heritage denim from Cone Mills. But Owens’ new Japanese denim project takes his obsession with denim to a whole new level. For this iteration of the project, Owens created a capsule made with the 16oz selvedge denim sourced from Yamaashi Orimono, one of the most respected Japanese denim mills. (The oz number designates the denim’s weight per square yard. The higher the number, the heavier the denim. 16oz is considered the highest end of midweight denim. It makes the denim stiff in the beginning, but it softens with wear and conforms to the contours of your body well.) The denim was woven on vintage Sakamoto shuttle looms.
All the products in the capsule were assembled in limited numbers in Japan, in Kurashiki, a town in the Okayama prefecture that is world-famous for being the center of Japanese denim production. The belt loops were sewn into the waistband for added strength and the seams chain-stitched on a 1960s vintage machine. All jeans feature a hefty black leather patch with the DRKSHDW logo.
Few things get our juices flowing more than product made with respect to heritage, and so we decided to bring in three styles from this project to ANT/DOTE - the outershirt, the Duke cut jean, and the Geth jean, all realized in jet black denim, bien sur. The outershirt is one of those jacket/shirt hybrids that Owens has been championing in his collections and that have become a staple in the last couple of years. The Duke cut is a classic slim leg jean cut that’s a little wider than Detroit. The Geth jean is a new, wide leg silhouette from Owens that we are quite enamored with.
