True blue tradition: how Japans coveted jeans are made [Video]

Call it an antidote to fast fashion: Japanese jeans hand-dyed with natural indigo and weaved on a clackety vintage loom, then sold at a premium to global denim connoisseurs.

Unlike their mass-produced cousins, the tough garments crafted at the small Momotaro Jeans factory in southwest Japan are designed to be worn for decades, and come with a lifetime repair warranty.

On site, Yoshiharu Okamoto gently dips cotton strings into a tub of deep blue liquid, which stains his hands and nails as he repeats the process.

The cotton is imported from Zimbabwe, but the natural indigo they use is harvested in Japan — its colour far richer than synthetic imitations, according to Okamoto.

He calls it a “time-consuming and costly” method, commonly used to dye kimonos in the 17th-19th century Edo period.

Momotaro Jeans was established in 2006 by Japan Blue, one of a few dozen denim producers in the …