The Truth About Uniqlo vs Levi Jeans vs. 1 Tiny Japanese Denim Brand

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Starting Simple: The Uniqlo Review

Today, we are doing a little comparison. We’re looking at Uniqlo’s impossibly priced $50 Japanese selvedge denim jeans versus a very famous Japanese brand‘s $160 selvedge denim jeans versus Levi’s $260 selvedge jeans.

What the heck is going on? Because there are huge price discrepancies, why aren’t we all just shopping at Uniqlo? I also said it was good, but is it actually good? The battle is on! TCB vs. Uniqlo vs. Levi’s jeans.

Quick Comparison: TCB vs. Uniqlo vs. Levi’s Jeans

Let’s Talk About Uniqlo

Okay, Uniqlo – probably the best deal you can get in selvedge denim on planet Earth. Let’s talk about why. So this is selvedge denim, and you’re probably used to hearing that if you want cheap selvedge denim, you go to places like China, you go Turkey, you go Bangladesh. They can make a ton of cheap selvedge denim. But Japan is not that – Japan is all artistry and this and that, and they would never make cheap denim – and you’d be abso-fruitly wrong because they do.

Uniqlo kind of says it without saying it – they say that their denim was specifically developed with Kaihara Mills. Usually, in the Japanese denim world, that means very particular things – the staple length of the cotton should be X length, and the cotton should feel like this or should feel like that. They get real specific.

What Uniqlo means is they say, “Hey Kaihara Mills, we need these jeans to come in under $50. What’s the cheapest selvedge denim that you could possibly make?” So when you think about these massive denim mills in Turkey, Bangladesh, China, and everything else, Kaihara Mills is essentially the Japanese equivalent of that. In any Japanese city, it is estimated that one out of every two pairs of jeans are made from Kaihara Mills denim.

The biggest thing – and I’m not going to go over this a lot because I’ve already written about it in another article – is that country of origin affects the cost of products a lot. So these Uniqlos are made in Bangladesh. Truthfully and to be totally honest, if you didn’t have a burning passion for raw or selvedge denim, you could get these jeans and be done because they are great, they are selvedge, they are cheap, and that’s it.

But you’re kind of missing the entire point of getting cool Japanese raw selvedge denim because what’s so fun about the Levi’s and the TCB jeans is that there are mistakes, there’s hand stitching, there are techniques taken from the ’50s and ’40s and ’60s all melded into something that’s not here on the Uniqlo jeans.

Moving Up: The Levi’s LVC 1967 505

Levi’s 1967 LVC 505 – we’re in the big leagues now. I’ve had mine for a while, and they’re fading beautifully. So there’s a question of why I bought these jeans when, in a moment, I’m going to talk about technically a better pair of jeans that are a hundred dollars cheaper.

Quick note: yes, Levi’s are more expensive, and it’s for a bunch of different reasons, but one thing that can’t be ignored and that is not Levi’s fault is that importing Japanese products and Japanese denim to the US does incur fees and duties and stuff like that, so they can’t control that price hike, and that’s why you see a lot of times denim from Japan is more expensive in US shops.

Okay, so the two easiest things to knock out first are: one, these are actually made, cut, and sewn in Japan, which drives the price up, and two, these are not meant to be bought by hundreds of thousands of people like Uniqlo’s – they’re meant to be much smaller batch. So Levi’s is ordering a smaller amount of things, and costs go up there, too. To be honest, they can charge a little more just because that’s how we’re thinking.

The other thing is, remember when I said Uniqlo kind of says these were specially developed by Kaihara Mills and Uniqlo together, and that reason was to cut down on price? It’s a little different here. Instead of trying to get it for the lowest price possible, Levi’s is trying to get their denim as close as they can to be exact reproductions of the specific denim that they’re selling. So they have 1947 denim, they have 1950s denim, this is 1967 505 fabric.

Levi’s also does specialty hardware per era of jeans they are producing. So, my pair of LVCs, for example, has a Talon zipper, not a YKK zipper. And most notably, they do this for every single era of their jeans. So, if you look at Levi’s LVC 1937s, you’ll notice a single copper rivet right where the zipper starts, which was then removed. Why was it removed? Because when cowboys and people were sitting around a fire in the ’30s, the fire heated up the rivet that was right near their “parts.”

With the LVC line, Levi’s started to introduce the use of heritage denim. Mine don’t have that because they’re from 1967. So denim was kind of still getting perfected then, so they don’t have a ton of character, but this line does have very interesting denim in it.

The Japanese Beast: TCB (Two Cat Brand)

Okay, and now the moment you’ve all been waiting for – the Japanese beasts TCB. Something else to note: these jeans are a steal at this price, but the price does move with the relationship between the US dollar and the Japanese yen or wherever you’re buying these from, so it could move and fluctuate.

There’s a whole sub-genre of Japanese denim brands that only recreate vintage Levi’s jeans and jackets to the most minute detail ever. TCB is not that – Taking Care of Business AKA Two Cat Brand – but they are one of the coolest Japanese denim brands ever, and they come in at an astoundingly good price, especially when compared to Levi’s.

So if we go back to Levi’s LVC for a second, obviously, we have different eras of jeans that all have different things in them that make them cool. Instead of sticking those into boxes and saying, “Well, jeans from the ’40s have these and jeans from the ’60s have these,” TCB, essentially as a company, takes things from all these different eras and puts them together on jeans and they kind of make Levi reproduction jeans but a little broader.

The Devil’s in the Details

The buttons on my TCB 1950s jeans are made of iron, and you can tell because the top button is actually starting to rust. Most people would say that’s a flaw, but do you know why? Because it is. But it’s still very cool that you have something else in your jeans that reacts over time and changes, which is why a lot of people like raw denim; it fades and looks cooler as you wear it more.

And if you go to TCB’s website, they say, “We’ve carefully studied a vintage piece TCB owns to every single detail, from the shape to the yarn count for each seam.” Also, you’ll notice that TCB goes to extensive lengths to never mention the word Levi’s, and that is because Levi’s is a very litigious company that will sue you into oblivion if you do anything that they have copyrighted.

Levi’s replicates fabric from the ’40s and ’50s, but we don’t know to what length. TCB and other repo brands do it to an insanely precise level, where you can guarantee this is really as close as you’re going to get to denim from that era. Except, interestingly, TCB uses Zimbabwe cotton on these jeans, which is supposedly the best cotton in the world. It’s some of the longest staple cotton fiber that you can get, which means it’s stronger, it’s softer, it’s all these fantastic things – which I’m 150% sure Levi’s was not using in the 1950s. But that’s the push and pull of TCB.

Besides all of that, this denim is unsanforized. You are definitely used to sanforized denim, which basically presses the denim so that way when you wash them, it doesn’t shrink a ton. This denim, if you got it raw, would shrink like 10 percent – an absolute ton – but what that does is it retains a lot of the interesting character from the denim, and it’s much more authentic.

So there’s leg twist on the left leg of these jeans, which a lot of people don’t like – I actually really like – it’s exactly what it sounds like where the leg of your jean is just twisted a little bit, and that’s due to the shrinking process and the uneven tension on the yarns from how they were woven.

Maybe this is too exhaustive, and you don’t care, but there are more things to talk about. All of the seams on these jeans that are chain stitched – and you can tell they’re chain stitched because the stitching looks like a chain – are done with a vintage machine called a Union Special, which is no longer made and hasn’t been made for a very long time. So you’re thinking, how do they upkeep these machines? Well, they have a bunch of them, and if a part breaks, they try to find that part in another machine that’s not working and they switch parts and so on and so forth, but the reason they do this is because the seams pucker in a specific way that denim nerds call roping and gives it this really beautiful pattern that looks like, well, rope.

The Levi’s Tax Explained

So, with all that being said, you’re probably asking the obvious question: “Michael, if there are jeans being made this cool that are a hundred dollars cheaper than Levi’s LVCs, why can Levi’s charge that much?” And there are three answers (well, four, but we already talked about one – the US trade agreements and the yen’s strength are really important.)

Number one is nobody knows. Number two, as I said in my Japanese denim versus Walmart article, Levi’s is paying for marketing, for photography, for rent, for a million million trillion things. The third most important reason is called the Levi’s tax. What is the Levi’s tax?

This is the Levi’s tax: rivets on pants – first invented by Levi’s. The red tab on the back of pants – first invented by Levi’s. Red ticker on selvedge IDs – first done by Cone Mills for Levi’s. The little patch on the back that is beige with red – first done by Levi’s. Jeans, really popular jeans – first done by Levi’s. Everything was done first by Levi’s, and because of that, everything that is jeans is essentially derived from Levi’s. If you look at all the details on TCB, it’s from Levi’s.

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Final Thoughts and Recommendations

So, in conclusion, is Uniqlo selvedge denim worth it? Yes, there is no better selvedge denim deal in the world that I know of than Uniqlo selvedge denim. Is Levi’s LVC denim worth it? At the end of the day, to be honest, it’s not worth it unless you are a mega fan of the Levi’s brand, and no other brand will do because then you have to get that brand.

But if you’re willing to look at other brands like TCB, Sugar Cane, Unbranded, Naked and Famous, Oni, Pure Blue Japan – there’s a million other different avenues that you can go where you get a little more bang for your buck.

Anyway, though, those are my thoughts on TCB vs. Uniqlo vs. Levi’s Jeans. Thank you so much for reading!

This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.

The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.