Keyword

Frayed Edges

Pants For the Cost of A Postage Stamp

Pants For the Cost of A Postage Stamp

A Conversation with Jacob Yazejian, Used Clothing Exporter

There’s like, a hundred different grades of industrial wipers. The best kind of wipers were made from men’s underwear, called gansies. For jeans, nowadays it’s all about torn this and torn that, but thirty years ago pair of jeans with a hole in the knees used to be cut up and sold to the Navy. You’d clean your machinery with these wipers. Looking for vintage is like looking for a needle in a haystack. One year the Japanese want over-sized printed T-shirts, the next year they want super small ones. The dredge of the industry for one period was men’s polyester pants. Those used to sell for six cents a pound. Ten years later, those same pants were worth $15 a piece.

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To Cap It All

To Cap It All

In 1977 I bought my first flat cloth cap – in navy cotton twill with leather detailing on each of the crown sections and a striped lining. It was a souvenir from a family trip to Jamaica, bought from a Rastafarian man selling his own designs at a stall in Kingston. At the time I saw the purchase as a defiant act: the feat of a post-colonial religious activist.

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