Raw Cut - Issue No. 011

Every pair of jeans has a direction.

Not north or south, east or west. But the fabric itself.

Look closely at a piece of denim and you'll see tiny diagonal ridges running across the weave. If they climb from lower left to upper right, that's right-hand twill. If they climb from lower right to upper left, it's left-hand twill.

That's it.

One tiny diagonal line.

It may also be one of the most overlooked design decisions in denim.

That little line helped build America's biggest jean brands. It changes the way fabric feels, the way it fades, and even stranger, the direction a pair of jeans naturally wants to twist after it's washed.

Not bad for something most people never notice.

The denim world picked its sides early.

Levi Strauss built America's original blue jeans on right-hand twill, and more than 150 years later, the iconic 501 still follows that same diagonal. Lee looked at the same weave and went the opposite direction, making left-hand twill part of its identity.

Then Wrangler looked at both and basically said, "We're doing something else."

In 1964, it introduced broken twill, a weave that alternates direction instead of committing to either side.

We'll come back to why.

When Japanese mills began reviving vintage American denim in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they weren't trying to outdo Levi's, Lee, or Wrangler.

They were trying to understand them.

Collectors hunted down old American jeans. Mills studied them thread by thread. They measured yarn sizes, analyzed dye, counted picks and ends, and even paid attention to something as subtle as the direction of the twill.

But once they understood the rules, they started making decisions of their own.

Some stayed faithful to right-hand twill.

Others intentionally chose left-hand twill. Not because it was historically "correct," but because they preferred how it softened, aged, and faded.

So what actually changes?

Less than the internet sometimes claims.

More than most people realize.

Right-hand twill has a reputation for feeling a little firmer when new, and holding a crisper surface over time. It's also known for producing the bold whiskers and sharp honeycombs that many raw denim enthusiasts chase.

Left-hand twill usually relaxes more quickly. The fabric often feels softer sooner, and its fades tend to develop with slightly softer edges and more vertical character.

Neither is objectively better. They're simply different personalities woven into the same cloth.

Of course, if you've ever gone searching for an explanation of twill direction online, you've probably stumbled into one of denim's oldest rabbit holes: how the direction of the twill should interact with the twist of the yarn itself.

This is where things get surprisingly messy.

Depending on who you ask, right-hand twill absolutely requires Z-twist yarns.

Or S-twist.

Or either one, depending on whether you're talking about the warp, the weft, or both.

Every explanation sounds convincing. Many contradict each other. I spent far longer than I'd like to admit chasing this one.

The deeper I dug, the more the simple answers disappeared. Even technical weaving references disagree because there isn't one universal formula. Different mills combine yarn twist and twill direction in different ways to produce different characteristics.

Sometimes the most honest answer isn't, "Here's the secret."

Sometimes it's, "It's more complicated than the internet makes it sound."

Fortunately, you don't need a microscope (or a degree in textile engineering) to see one effect of twill direction for yourself.

Wash an unsanforized (or simply, not pre-shrunk) pair of jeans a few times. As the denim relaxes, the legs can begin to rotate. The outseam slowly creeps toward the front or back of the leg.

That's called leg twist.

It isn't poor sewing. It isn't bad quality. It's the fabric following the direction it naturally wants to move.

Now Wrangler's decision starts to make sense.

By the 1960s, leg twist had become such a common complaint that people were returning perfectly good jeans because the seams no longer looked straight.

Wrangler attacked the problem by inventing broken twill, allowing the opposing weave directions to cancel each other out.

Levi's solved it differently. In 1976, engineer Karin Hakanson patented a finishing process that intentionally skewed the fabric before it was ever cut into jeans. By offsetting the fabric first, the natural movement after washing was largely canceled out before the customer ever noticed it.

And here's the part that made me smile.

Today, some of the world's most obsessive vintage reproduction brands intentionally bring leg twist back.

What was once considered a manufacturing problem has become a mark of authenticity.

That's denim.

The deeper you go, the more you realize there are very few "right" answers. Nearly every decision involves tradeoffs, preferences, and decades of accumulated experience. Something as simple as the angle of a weave can influence how a pair of jeans feels on day one, how it fades over the next ten years, and whether one person falls in love with it while another reaches for something else.

The funny thing about craftsmanship is that the biggest decisions are rarely the obvious ones.

Most people notice the leather patch.

Or the red selvedge line.

Or the fades.

The people making the fabric are thinking about the angle of a weave they hope you'll never notice.

That's craftsmanship.

Getting the invisible parts right.

Why does this matter to Raleigh Denim? Those invisible decisions are exactly what we obsess over whenever we develop a new fabric. Weight. Cotton. Dye. Loom. Shrinkage. Twill direction.

We're never asking which weave is objectively better.

We're asking what kind of story we want the fabric to tell five years from now.

Because every great pair of jeans starts long before the first stitch.

Sometimes it starts with nothing more than a tiny diagonal line.

Every pair of jeans has a direction.

The rest is simply the story that follows.

The biggest change this week was discovering there wasn't one.

After all the anticipation surrounding the Fader's first soak, we expected...something.

Anything.

Instead, the denim quietly went back to work.

Turns out the soak didn't rewrite the story.

It just cleaned the page.

Here's this week’s dispatch.