Paul O’Neill has never really recovered from the shock of his first trip to Japan.
It was 2012, and the Irish designer was three years into his dream gig leading Levi’s Vintage Clothing, the historic denim brand’s sub-label dedicated to faithfully recreating archival garments. At the time, LVC was based in Amsterdam, which meant most of O’Neill’s work travel involved flying across the Atlantic to Levi’s headquarters in San Francisco, where he’d dive deep in the company’s archives and take the occasional side trip to LA to dig for rare jeans at the famous Rose Bowl Flea Market.
“That used to be mind-blowing for me,” O’Neill, who now lives in the Bay Area, told me of those early California trips. “I thought that was going to be as good as it gets. And then I went to Tokyo for the first time, and all of a sudden the game had totally changed.”
In vintage shops like Harajuku’s BerBerJin, O’Neill discovered not only the most heartstopping specimens of vintage Levi’s he’d seen—rack after rack of early-to-mid 20th century “Big E” jeans and trucker jackets, all acquired stateside by Japanese collectors in the ’80s, long before anyone in America ever considered they might be worth something someday—but also a legion of likeminded denim obsessives. “They’re so specific,” O’Neill said of the collecting culture in Japan. “You go into a record shop and they have the rarest version of any LP you could ever think of. Go next door and they only have vintage Pez dispensers. And that deep level of expertise and reverence exists here for Levi’s.”
Not long after that initial brush with the country, O’Neill began making regular pilgrimages to Japan—first to uncover Levi’s grails to replicate for LVC, and then eventually to produce significant swaths of the line itself in the country’s storied denim factories. That arrangement falls right in line with the prevailing understanding of Japanese denim most regular folks have: The island nation is where you turn to find artisanal dungarees of the highest order, made the old-fashioned way on antique shuttle looms snapped up from American manufacturers as they began modernizing in the middle of the last century. If you’re after a perfectly preserved slice of denim history, Japan is the place for you.
As it turns out, though, Japan also happens to be the right place to dream up denim’s future. These days, O’Neill serves as the design director of Levi’s Collections—he still heads up Levi’s Vintage Clothing, but now also oversees the brand’s Skate imprint and its newest initiative: the just-unveiled Levi’s Blue Tab. A spiritual successor to the cult-loved 2010s line Levi’s Made & Crafted, Blue Tab is positioned as the progressive counterpart to LVC’s nostalgic preservationism. The entire collection is produced in Japan, where I caught up with O’Neill in mid-January, in a quiet corner of Levi’s sleek Tokyo showroom. To mark Blue Tab’s official launch, the brand flew in a motley gaggle of international press, influencers, and K-pop stars (I’ll let you guess which category I fall into) to attend a runway presentation and visit one of the factories where the line is manufactured.
“For years, I’ve been making LVC products and sometimes wishing I could make things more cropped or make the sleeves wider,” O’Neill said, “but we were kind of fenced in with trying to reproduce a historical product. When we started to work on Blue Tab, all of that opened up. We were able to take the best things from Levi’s, the DNA, and then create much more modern silhouettes.”
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