You’d look so good on my floor

The best precursor to romance, in its wildest throes, is denim. Pop the clutch and peel away. It looks best, crumpled on the floor.

Photos by Pete Daly

A fox ain’t sly, he just can’t think any slower. Men who design and produce quality jeans are no different. Their cortex sees a raw palate of denim and imagines it creasing around a pair of swinging hips. Such shrewd visionaries!

Some of the best, would y’believe it, are from Australia. Malcontent with searching for decent cuts and colourings, a cupful of men from Sydney decided in 2000 to inject their own flavour into the market. Rumour says they towed some denim around behind a ute in a field to get that faded, beat-up look (it could even have been a miTSUBIshi ute… uh? Uh?).

All of a sudden, denim was held together by safety pins and the fingers of lovers, hugging a shade tighter around the calves. Tighter and tighter it hugged until they looked sprayed-on.

Then, a wave of rolled chinos blew the cut back out a little. Regardless of Stab’s speculative mini-history of denim in the 2000s, what you should really know is that copper rivets still hold those joins down and make all the difference when coloured, and that the weft stitch, which still passes under two-ish warp threads, holds surprising leverage over the end-product.

Buttons and stitching ain’t something you should overlook. Going out to dinner? Stuff ‘em under a collared shirt and choose something dark with matching coloured rivets and stitches, to give more of a pant look. Daytime? Contrasted stitching with some rough metal rivets and whatever your flavour of tee. If the denim’s a bolder shade of twill, make it pop with a tortoiseshell button. It’s these particulars that Stab adores. And, here we examine them.

Oh, and, BUY STAB ISSUE 58 ONLINE, HERE.