Before 1930, buying jeans was a guessing game.

You intentionally bought them too big, soaked them, prayed, and hoped the size stitched into the waistband bore some resemblance to the size that came out of the wash.

Then one man fixed it. And in doing so, accidentally turned shrinkage from an unavoidable problem into a deliberate choice.

His name was Sanford Lockwood Cluett.

Before he had anything to do with cotton, he'd spent his youth wrangling alligators in Florida, picked up some Seminole along the way, and served as an engineer in the Spanish-American War.

Not exactly the résumé you'd expect from the man who'd go on to reshape how the entire world's clothes fit.

Cluett joined his uncles' business, Cluett, Peabody & Co., in 1919, a company famous for detachable shirt collars. It was a real problem: people were done with stiff, uncomfortable collars, and the company's new attached-collar shirts had a nasty habit of shrinking unevenly in the wash.

Sales tanked.

Cluett, who by then already held patents for things like a bubble sextant, decided the shrinking wasn't a mystery, it was physics within the fabric itself. Weaving puts the fabric under tension, causing stretching. Then the first wash lets it spring back to where it started. So instead of waiting for the shrinking to happen after making the garment, he built a machine to do most of that work first.

This machine fed the cloth between a heated cylinder and a rubber blanket, compressed it, and forced the yarns to relax into their true resting state in advance.

He patented the process in 1930. It became known (with the kind of self-naming confidence only a man with 200 patents to his name could pull off) as Sanforizing.

Denim caught up fast.

Erwin Mills was reportedly the first to Sanforize denim, in 1936, for overalls sold under JC Penney's Big Mac label. Lee wasn't far behind. Levi's, however, wasn't in a hurry.

While other manufacturers embraced Sanforization, Levi's continued selling its famous shrink-to-fit 501s for decades. Pre-shrunk Levi's didn't arrive until the early 1960s. For many people, buying jeans a size too big and letting the first wash do the fitting wasn't history, it was simply how you bought jeans.

But over time, Sanforization won. Manufacturers finally had a way to sell jeans that actually fit off the shelf: no soaking, no guessing, and no losing two inches of inseam to the washing machine.

Here's the part that matters for what we do every week in this newsletter: Sanforized denim shrinks maybe 1–3%. Unsanforized, what we still call "loomstate," or "shrink-to-fit," shrinks anywhere from 5% to 10%, sometimes more, almost all of it in the legs.

That's not a flaw. That's the ritual.

Most of what we make is Sanforized, on purpose. We're not interested in making you guess your size.

But every so often, we make an exception. We just closed a pre-order for a run of true Loomstate. Unsanforized, straight off the loom, woven for us by Proximity Manufacturing. It's currently in production, and if you were one of the people who ordered it, you're going to have a very different relationship with your first soak than most everyone else reading this newsletter.

It's a funny twist of history. What was once simply the way every pair of jeans was made has become a specialty product, sought out by people who enjoy being part of the process instead of skipping it.

Cluett solved a real problem for the mass market: predictable, no-drama fit. We use that solution most of the time because most people want jeans that fit today, not jeans that fit in six weeks.

But there's still a place for loomstate denim. For people who enjoy watching a pair become uniquely theirs. Neither approach is right or wrong.

Cluett just gave us the choice.

This week's project was an electric fence. The deer have developed expensive taste.

The Rookie spent the week setting posts and pulling wire around the hardest-hit areas of the farm. Then, over the weekend, he traded dirt for concrete, helping repair sewing machines in the Workshop.

No glamorous work here. Just steady, repetitive movement and more hours in the denim.

Here's this week’s dispatch.