The new official TOJ thread, 2011 - Page 583

Got an email from a TOJ customer, really nice letter and a quote that brightened my day (though it's like 7:30am here and I'm still up) - (this is where I publicly pat myself on the back: )

"I have a lot of fashion world people around me in London (Kim Jones, who designs Louis Vuitton now, Alister Mackie, the director of Another and Dazed, stylist for Lanvin etc. to vulgarly namedrop a couple) and often when I wear one of your pieces they ask where it's from (the daypack & the fishtail specifically come to mind). It's REALLY good work you do. Not that you necessarily need encouragement, but I think if I worked as hard as you did for as long as you did and just had the same heads popping up to ask for a varsity, I'd feel slightly jaded, to say the least. I'm very excited to hear about your move to Tokyo, hope that goes smoothly, and what may become of this bar project."

lol, not even that man, that's my job; I just sometimes get worried that certain things I try to convey in the clothes don't do enough... not much talk about the actual clothes anymore, though the actual level goes up all the time. A lot of the stuff I make is very raw, so some people like the first edition stuff, some people like the more refined third version (see: Bomber), etc, etc... don't get much talk about the recent stuff though.

I do, I do. I have your email starred, which denotes the rare status of 'epic email I must send to this person soon'

ps I'm just making clothes, so you know most of what's going on already. Wasn't hinting at any Mother Theresa-like stuff that I was doing but not posting the TOJ thread.

Well, I've had enough other jobs before - I'm 30 soon, and my life has basically changed pretty drastically every year since I was born - and I'm always working on other stuff besides clothes, mostly personal research that I do in my down time, it's study. However, TOJ is a job, and it's pretty good. I don't lose sight of that fact, even on the worst days, nor would it ever shutter because I didn't think it was a good job. That wouldn't be the cause. It's really quite rewarding to get be so direct and in control of what I produce as work, so I'm gonna chip away at many incarnations of this. I think a lot of you guys may lose interest in clothes someday and I'll still be making some form of clothing for a living, whether anybody even is aware of it or not. I've found a niche. I may be making something totally different, I dunno, maybe furniture. I like making stuff in general. Over time I get into rarer and rarer things and get more focused on what it is I want to make; for the past few years that has been nice leather jackets, something I could spread to the world with a vision I had. It worked out pretty nicely, and can do so in the future as well.

Anyway, as you guys might be able to tell, I am also kind of an eccentric dude with a sense of humor that is not always well understood, and I've found myself in random places on earth all my life; that is just who I am. Honestly, I had a lot of troubles in my early working life, my personality was just never cut out for being at the bottom rung of a corporate ladder. I am normally pretty modest and just like pouring a bunch of ideas into stuff, and letting my work talk - unfortunately I learned later on that in a lot of offices it's just wank and talk and nobody really cares about actual work, how thoughtful you are, how much of a sense of humor you have creatively incorporated into something - so life in a cubicle didn't suit me. It took me a number of years of bashing my head into this same wall, over and over, until I finally asked myself, literally word for word I said this: 'why the fuck am I doing this to myself?' and then the road of enlightenment, so it were, rolled out before me. Obviously it's longer than a paragraph but that's essentially it in a nutshell.
So yes, I do enjoy TOJ and no, I don't think I've numbed to it. I just felt like the party was in a bit of a lull lately.

It probably did shrink a bit, and it does lose the gloss. Just a hot soak and an air dry is good to these jackets. Keep them away from the washing machine though. Uncontrol's leather hides are sitting in my apartment, still trying to get them to bone dry after a couple days (slow drying in my litttle place, not much air circulation) - dry now and the finish is caviar-like, for lack of a better word. I'll go with that.
I don't normally pre-wash the hides anymore but this is a special project and Uncontrol won't have the option of hot soaking and stuff later, because of the snakeskin - that'd be risky to try any kind of wash on it since I don't know how it'd react without any experience. This way the leather will be ready to go and a touch tougher, a little less soft, but as he wears it and it gets more contact form other stuff, it'll kind of self polish itself in the raised areas (the elbows and around the cuffs, the waistband, the areas around all the zippers - super nice effect. I've done it before and the results are always good, but I broke my washing machine twice doing the washed leather at home So now I just sell all the jackets unwashed and let you wash them as you will.