You’re currently viewing our Primordial line of clothing. With the Primordial line comes more premium fabrics, details, and features that far exceed the grade of standard garments. In the case of our Chapter 1s, we are using 15oz Japanese selvedge denim and 100% hemp pocket bags.

Selvedge denim is made via a shuttle loom and is a self-finished fabric, meaning it doesn’t fray in its unsewn state. It’s typically hallmarked by a white selvedge line at the fabric’s edge and a red ticker, as seen here. Selvedge denim is much slower to produce and only comes in half-width (a roll of fabric is half the width of what’s more commonly used today), which means it’s typically around four times more expensive than its wide-width, non-selvedge counterpart, although prices can vary greatly. Selvedge denim harkens back to the old days of denim making but stopped being the dominant denim in the 1980s when the far more efficient projectile loom took over. However, a slower, lower-yielding process that produces a cleaner and more interesting product naturally attracts craftsmen and artists, particularly in Japan—though fantastic denim is made worldwide. Japanese denim mills originally set out to create perfect recreations of vintage, hard-to-find denim, but soon the culture morphed beyond recreation into an art form. Now, selvedge denim is where we find crazy textures, heavier fabric weights, fascinating dyeing techniques, obsessive attention to detail, and of course, a cleaner, more finished look. The world of selvedge denim is a rabbit hole! Welcome to the party!

Hemp pocket bags feel like silk, although, they are not. They are hemp. There is an age-old problem the world is lazily trying to solve: holes in pockets. There must be a million ways to do it; some involve moving seams, others involve using ballistic nylon. Our way involves hemp. We at Iron Snail HQ are good friends with a scientist named Zach. Zach tests our fabrics when they need to be tested and most recently, hemp needed to be tested (full blog post here). We knew hemp was stronger than cotton, but the question was, how much? The answer to that was: quite a bit. We found that, for the most part, our lightweight hemp samples were almost as strong as our heavy-weight cotton samples. Meaning that if we used a mid-weight hemp herringbone, we could keep our pocket bags flowy and silky while also far surpassing their cotton counterparts in strength and tear resistance. Scroll down for more information on what makes hemp so magical.