How Do You Make Denim Look Like Leather?
The Levi’s Type I is the first-ever denim jacket as we know it, the blueprint for all modern truckers. It’s remained practically unchanged for over 120 years because Levi’s knows better than to mess with the classics. And then, through one simple trick, Japanese retailer BIOTOP renders the Type I near-unrecognizable.
As well as being a boutique stocking Japan’s major cities with Highsnobiety-accredited “good clothes” from the likes of AURALEE and Lemaire, BIOTOP is a hotbed of tasteful collaborations. Both France’s finest old-school shoemaker, Paraboot, and Italy’s gold standard of avant-garde artisanal shoemaking, Guidi, make BIOTOP’s exclusive shoes. And exacting IYKYK menswear label A.PRESSE creates bespoke garments to fill BIOTOP’s clothing racks.
By those standards, BIOTOP x Levi’s is mass-market. But it’s no less artful.
The duo has subtly tweaked the first-ever denim jacket, the Levi’s Type I, to relax its boxy shape and then not-so-subtly covered the entire thing in a layer of shiny black polyurethane (PU).
The jacket’s outside has a glossy sheen similar to leather, it’s only on the inside that the light-washed indigo denim becomes visible. However, some black smudges reach the inside, because of the inherent imperfections of hand-applied PU coating.
Even Levi’s signature red label is blacked-out, making the jacket’s denim roots harder to decipher when it hits BIOTOP’s racks come February 13, though the jackets are available to pre-order now.
It’s a similar transformative effect to Acne Studio’s “leather” denim where a waxed black finish transforms the indigo-dyed cotton into something near-indistinguishable from heavy black leather. Naturally, people online are scratching their heads trying to figure out the workings of this clever illusion.
Now, it's time for the world's most famous denim brand to try some clever fabric trickery. Levi's, with the help of BIOTOP, has seemingly done the impossible: turned denim into leather.
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