Denim Nerds are a global tribe marked by passion, connoisseurship and a particular brand of COOL. Find out why in this fourth instalment of our series: Fashion Tribes, first published in Spectrum/The Saturday Age/The Sydney Morning Herald .
Click back later to meet Sneaker Heads and Bush Doof and Festival girls, among the myriad style tribes of modern Melbourne.
Words: Janice Breen Burns Photographs: Simon Schluter
Martin Kirby first dipped into denim‘s long indigo-blue history in 2007. He was on tour with his band in Tokyo and bought what he calls his first “real” jeans, a pair of Iron Hearts he still habitually wears today. “Five hundred dollars, the heaviest denim you could buy, and they could stand up by themselves.”
No elastine, no “plastic” additives, as Kirby puts it, and raw; no chemical pre-wash (hence their stiffness). Just bog-honest, pure cotton, hand-dyed, shuttle-loomed indigo denim like God – and one Morris Levi Strauss who whipped up the first pair of dungaree-like jeans for working men in the 1850s – intended.
Back in Melbourne, Kirby’s authentic stand-alone Japanese crafted jeans whipped up enough love (“My friends are like; they’re amazing…!”) to seed a bona fide tribe. Kirby vowed he’d build a store to supply them and a dozen-odd years later in 2016, he did. It’s called Godspeed. The Melbourne Denim Nerd tribe’s still small but fervantly connected to a global scene by social media and online forums that revere rare jeans like a religion.
Vintage Levi’s particularly, from 40 years old to a “Holy Grail” 150, cost $2000 to $5000 on average (but can rocket to $20,000) and are as beloved by nerds as selvedge jeans, mostly crafted in Japan smaller-than-mass-produced pieces of hand-dyed indigo denin woven on old-fashioned shuttle looms that leave a distinctive, un-frayable “self edge”.
“There’s a massive denim nerd culture,” says Kirby, “They obsess over the smallest details. They’ll post photos and comment on each other’s jeans, like: “Hey guys; what do you think of this fit, or what about the way my jeans are fading…” Or some’ll write down how many days they’ve worn their jeans on the inside of a pocket then after 300 days or whatever, people comment on how good they look after the first wash…”
The likeness of raw denim jeans to living things as they fade and shrink around their owner’s body is often mentioned with lyrical waxing. The imprint of buttocks and knees, wallets and phones, and those “whiskers” that radiate from the crotch, mapping years of bending and sitting, all fuse with denim‘s heritage (notably it’s traditions of Japanese craftsmanship and collecting since the end of WW2, says Kirby) into soemthing as unique and personal as a wedding ring.
“If you know, you can look down at the cuff of our jeans,” Kirby says, “We’ll turn them up so you can see the little red line that means they’re selvedge, they’re special, they belong to a denim nerd…”
The Age, Spectrum. FAshion Tribes series , The denim aficionados story by Jan Breen Burns. Pic Simon Schluter 18 October 2018.
Left to Right:
Dylan Farquhar, 21, retail assistant, wears Rats “British Millerain” oiled cotton jacket, Godspeed tee, 3Sixteen jeans and Red Wing “8130 Moc Toes” boots.
Nanaka Mitsui, 28, denim specialist, wears vintage military jacket, Godspeed tee, vintage Levi’s and Converse sneakers.
Martin Kirby, 32, denim master/owner of Godspeed, wears Rats “Type 1” jacket, Tanuki “NR1” jeans and Red Wings “877 Moc Toes” boots.
James Campbell, 29, retail assistant, wears Denim Rouge “Territory” shirt, Trophy Dirt jeans and Converse sneakers with Thunders Love socks.
