Junya Watanabe Low Rise Jeans

Raw denim is bought as a promise: everything interesting about it happens later, and only if you wear it. A stone wash takes the other route and does the aging at the mill, tumbling the finished garment with an abrasive, or with enzymes that do the same work chemically, until the indigo has been knocked off the surface of the yarn and the cloth has gone soft the whole way through. What you get is a jean that has already arrived. It is soft on the first day, the color will not travel far from where it now is, and the fades sit where the process put them rather than where a body would have put them. That is a real trade and it is worth making deliberately rather than by default. Eight percent polyurethane is the second decision and on this jean it is not optional: a slim leg with no give, worn from a waistband sitting below the hip bone, is a garment that argues with you on a staircase.

We are usually on the side of the jean that ages on its wearer. This is the exception, because a slim jean cut from a low waist has to be comfortable on the first day to be worth owning at all, and a raw one is not.

Junya Watanabe designs under his own name inside Comme des Garçons, and this is him making a jean rather than making a point about one, which he also does.

Ninety-two percent cotton and eight percent polyurethane. Made in Japan. Low rise, slim through the leg, with a flared hem. Color: indigo stone wash.

Slim and low together mean this is sized at the hip and not at the waist. The stretch in the cloth is what makes that combination workable, and it also means the jean relaxes across a day and returns overnight rather than staying wherever the day left it. The flare is at the hem rather than from the knee, so the leg stays close along most of its length and opens only at the end, which lets it sit over a shoe without covering it.

With the White Drapy Top, sheer above a close leg. With the Silver Sequin Top. Under the Junya Watanabe Leather Patchwork Jacket, cropped over slim, which is the proportion a flare at the hem is cut for.

Wash cold and inside out and as seldom as the wearing allows: a stone wash has already taken the indigo as far as it was meant to go, and a hot machine takes it further. Keep it out of a dryer, because heat is what ends a stretch fiber and a jean without recovery is a jean that has stopped fitting. Our care guidance covers denim in more detail.

The Black Denim Bell-Bottom Jeans is the black pair that opens from the knee instead of at the hem, and the x Levi’s Denim Jeans with Pleated Inserts is the wide trouser with pleated panels set in. Junya Watanabe has his own account of the house on the Comme des Garçons designer page.