On the suit of a super hero, there's always a secret zipper hidden. But I think it can be on the front, isn't it? Everytime I go travelling, I always squeeze things into my suitcase saying I would need this and that and I can always succeed in zipping up my suitcase, barely though, realizing again the greatness of the zipper.For people who are used to the button-fly pants, I personally don't feel the drastic difference in the usability of a zipper jacket and of a regular button fly jacket. But if I were to launch a new brand in the 50's trying to compete with the world famous brands out there, I would have done anything possible to differentiate our jackets from others. Thinking this way, this jacket with many iconic details start to look more adorable, doesn't it? Things change at a dizzying pace these days. More and more products are starting out in alpha or beta versions and continuing to grow. Observing this trend,I wanted to create clothing with a "Z" in the product number. This "Z" doesn't mean it's the final version. It just means it's a little more fully equipped. Front zip, action pleats, rounded bartucks, and six elastic bands inside. If the brand that introduced the denim jacket in 1947 had been a latecomer, I'm sure they would have followed suit with features like this. The front pleats are also interesting. They were said to be for size adjustment, but in reality they're fastened with jump rings and can't be adjusted. And yet they persisted. Perhaps this was the first time, the front pleats were recognized as a "design" rather than a "specification." This time, we created a jacket with the 1950s front zip, rounded bar tucks, action pleats, and six elastic bands. A latecomer jacket with full features. The "Z" stands for zipper. Rancher'z Jacket is now on sale. ■FabricWe have developed many Levi's repros and one Lee model so far but it was actually first time for TCB to produce left-hand twill denim fabric. We could not make use of the accumulated know-how, knowledge so far so we started the product development from the scratch. Wrangler is the big 3 brands in the American denim history but compared to the other 2, the history is relatively shorter, starting from 1975 under the name of Wrangler. While I was doing a research on their vintage, the ads, etc, I found an interesting page on the Gimmie Book (the last picture). A kid dressed in the cowboy style says "Mom likes 'em 'cause they're sanforized, says they're so easy to wash." This was a proof that Wrangler's fabric is sanforized so thanks to this little kid, we have done the fabric right! It's a left hand twill, 11.6 oz fabric with yarn count 9 for both the warps and wefts. According to my research, the Wrangler's art number for this model, 11MW, comes from the fact that the fabric used on this model was 11oz. Because it's left hand twill, the angle of the weaving becomes a bit steeper than right hand twill because of the construction of the vintage shuttle loom machines, which will lead to rather some waterfall fade (vertically faded) than dotty fade seen on Levis. Speaking of the sanforizing process, it consists of 3 different processes: Anti-twisting, anti-shrinkage, and singeing (burning the fluffy hairs on the surface of fabric). Looking at the vintage Wrangler of the 50's, the legs twist strongly so we have only done the anti-shrinkage process for this fabric. So, it's like half unsanforized and half sanforized!
