Why is selvedge denim more expensive?
What is selvedge denim?
Anyone who likes to wear jeans must have heard of red-ear selvedge denim jeans. Sometimes when buying jeans, when they hear that the price is so expensive, they ask the clerk, “Why are your jeans so expensive?” The clerk will also say that it is red-ear jean selvedge. So what exactly are red ear selvedge jeans? Red-ear raw selvedge denim or washing selvedge denim jeans refer to jeans made of red-ear selvage denim fabric. The red-ear is split into red and ear, red generally refers to red, ear usually refers to the edge, and here it refers to the edging of the denim fabric. , it is very simple to understand in this way, jeans made of denim with red edging are red-ear selvedge jeans.
Purchase selvedge stripe denim fabric
A close-up view of the red ears was present during the weaving process, not added at a later stage.
The width of the red selvedge denim fabric is only 90cm, while the width of the general fabric is between 140-150cm. This is actually related to the use of the old-fashioned shuttle loom for the red selvage denim fabric. The hemming mentioned above comes with the tannin fabric produced by the shuttle loom, and is not sewn or added later, and because the hemming, the so-called ear, looks like a The red line also has the saying of red ears.
In fact, there are not only red ears, but also various colors of the selvedge.
The narrow width of the red ear denim fabric means that a pair of trousers of the same size needs more fabric. Those who may not have bought fabric and do not know that the fabric they buy is calculated according to the length. The width of the fabric is the same as The price has nothing to do, that is, the narrower and wider fabrics need more to make a pair of trousers, and the price of the materials will naturally increase. Furthermore, the efficiency of the shuttle loom is slower, and the time and labor costs are higher, which is also the reason for its high price.
▼Only shuttle looms can weave red-eared selvedge denim, but shuttleless looms cannot. At that time, shuttleless looms had high efficiency and low cost, and were now the common weaving method.
What are the benefits of red selvedge denim fabric?
For ordinary consumers, it is the decoration of rolled up trousers with red edging strips. For enthusiasts, it is not only a feeling, but also a kind of quality. show. This is actually very similar to custom suits. Real lovers think that only hand-made suits are custom-made, and men who need to wear suits because of work requirements don’t care whether they are machine or hand-made, they only care about whether they fit and look good.
Now many brands of jeans are also called red selvedge jeans, and the price is still very cheap. In fact, the biggest difference from the original or the most “authentic” red-ear jeans is that the process of industrialization has turned many fabrics into shuttleless machine production, the production cost is greatly reduced, which is completely two concepts from the shuttle loom spinning. These fake red-eared denim pretending to be red-eared fabrics basically use an overlock machine or artificially add a woven ribbon to the woven fabric to pretend to be real red-eared denim.
Why is selvedge denim more expensive?
The reasons why red-eared denim is more expensive mainly include the following aspects:
(1) The loom for producing red-ear denim has been discontinued as early as 1983 and has been replaced by modern rapier looms, so red-ear denim is very rare in the market; in addition, this loom is a woven loom. The production efficiency is low, its production capacity is only 1/6~1/8 of modern rapier looms, the labor intensity of weaving workers is high, and the labor cost is high;
(2) The cotton grade of the yarns used is relatively high, and most of them use ring-spun yarns, so the cost of yarns is higher than that of conventional air-spun yarns;
(3) The loss of red ear denim is large during the weaving process.
The loom needs to change the shuttle every 20 cm or so, and waste 5~10 m of yarn when changing the shuttle;
(4) In terms of dyeing, red ear denim uses bundle dyeing, which is more expensive than the sheet dyeing method used in conventional denim;
(5) Modern jeans are produced by large-scale production with advanced modern equipment, and the processing cost is low; while most of the red-ear jeans use traditional processing and production techniques, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming, and the cost is 4 to 10 times that of modern jeans;
(6) The width of red-ear denim is only 76 cm (30 inches), while the width of modern denim is 152 cm (60 inches). Ordinary denim has high losses.
