Your Favorite Brand From Japan Is Having Trouble Making Denim

Johan Lam of 3Sixteen ordered one of their custom Japanese selvedge denim fabrics this summer, and the mill confirmed delivery for December 2029.

That date is jarring, but it is not a typo. Lam cofounded 3Sixteen with Andrew Chen and started making jeans in 2008. Lam handles 3Sixteen’s fabric buying, and he described the lead time for his most recent denim order on the brand’s podcast, Singularities. The full episode is worth a listen and offers an unusually candid account of this problem (YouTube/Spotify/Apple).

Lam’s orders used to land six to nine months out, and he built his ordering rhythm around that. Then confirmations started coming back 12 to 15 months out. Then 15 to 18. Then three and a half years away.

Lam and Chen were careful to say they can only speak for their own brand, though Chen did generalize more broadly: “Your favorite brand from Japan is having trouble making denim. It’s not just us.” There have been many small indicators of this problem, and I touched on it briefly in a Substack note last week, but hearing it stated so bluntly from industry veterans made me want to investigate further. The rest of the industry tells the same story that 3Sixteen does, from several directions at once, and the short version is this: the world wants more selvedge denim than there are looms to weave it; the number of looms is fixed and slowly falling; and no amount of demand can fix it.

The Shortage is Already Visible

Before we discuss any supply-side details, look at the symptoms. If you are a denim enthusiast, you have certainly run into at least one of these in the past two years.

Core Fabrics Stop Restocking

3sixteen’s 100x series, their core denim offering, is a perfect topical example. They haven’t delivered any 100x fabric in 2026, with the most recent shipment landing in early 2025. They’ve been rationing the fabric and focusing on their best-selling cuts. The next shipment isn’t expected until March 2027. Brands don’t typically announce these types of delays as explicitly as Lam and Chen do, and consumers are usually stuck refreshing pages in hopes of something that won’t come.

Brands Discontinue Core Fabrics

Iron Heart’s 21/23oz Ultra Heavy Raw (UHR) line has been a staple of their collection for the last 15 years. It’s the only product line in the Iron Heart collection that is unsanforized. But now, it’s been discontinued. A single mill in Japan weaves the UHR line, run by a husband-and-wife team, with four looms, only two of which can weave UHR. The building sits in a residential area, so the looms are permitted to run eight hours a day, producing about 0.8 rolls, roughly fifty meters, daily. In April, Denim Hunters reported that Iron Heart had restocked it while saying production might be ending, and that the two-loom setup “has always limited supply, but now it sounds like it may no longer be viable.” The follow-up was more finite. This restock is the final one, and “limited production has always been part of the story, and this is the last chapter.” The fabric existed because one small mill was willing to run it. When that mill stopped, it stopped existing.

Brands Diversify Away From Denim

A denim company adds knitwear, then hats, then jackets, then shoes. From the outside, it might read as a brand trying to capitalize on trends, and to some extent that might be true, but Lam shares an understandable justification.

In investing, you don’t wanna put all of your money into one stock or one sector because things fluctuate greatly. And if something happens, an event happens, that particularly affects that sector that you’re heavily invested in, may it be tech or AI or health or finance, then your portfolio takes a big dip. And so in that vein, we were heavily invested in Kuroki (Mills). All our eggs were in that basket. And all of our denim was supplied by Kuroki.— Johan Lam

Lam frames this as portfolio management. In March 2019, the brand had 8 categories compared to 13 in 2026. Today the catalog runs 380 products, and thirty-seven of them are denim. A similar pattern appears with Left Field NYC, which has 203 products, 37 of them jeans.

Lam is explicit that denim is still the biggest single part of the business, and thirty-seven pieces of denim will quickly out-earn forty-five accessories. But the product that made the brand’s reputation now shares studio space with eyewear and incense, which can be stocked on a more reliable schedule.

All three of these share the same root cause. This is largely out of their control, but the known risk has lately grown exponentially into an unknown risk.

The Looms Set the Ceiling

A shuttle loom carries the weft thread across the warp inside a wooden shuttle, and then carries it back. The thread is never cut. It turns at the edge and comes home, and that turn is the selvedge, or “self edge” — a finished border woven by the machine’s own motion. A modern projectile or air-jet loom does it differently. It fires a fresh length of weft across, snips it at both ends, and fires again. That is far faster, but every pass leaves two raw edges, which is why ordinary jeans need overlocked seams to keep from fraying.

Selvedge denim can only be woven on shuttle looms. Nobody manufactures shuttle looms anymore. Every one in operation is a vintage machine, most of them fifty to a hundred years old, and they cannot be sped up. They are not automated. People need to walk the floor and watch them.

The shuttle itself has built-in limits. It has mass, so it can only be thrown so far, which caps the cloth at roughly thirty inches wide, whereas a modern loom weaves sixty or more. It has to decelerate and reverse on every single pass, which caps the speed. And because the cloth is narrow, one pair of jeans consumes more running time than the same pair cut from wide fabric. The width penalty and the speed penalty compound.

There are very few of these machines in existence in the world, even at the largest mills. Kuroki Mills runs about a hundred shuttle looms; Nihon Menpu runs about a hundred and fifty, which is the most in Japan. Everyone else has fewer. Some mills have six, and some, like the Iron Heart UHR mill, have only four.

Global demand for selvedge denim is growing, including luxury houses, multinational brands, large Japanese retailers, and American and European brands. But more mills can’t be built to meet the rising demand. When demand rises, the orders stack up. Whoever ordered last loses the race.

They’re running at the pace that they’re running at. We just can’t get the fabric.— Andrew Chen

The historical irony of the situation isn’t lost on Chen. Shuttle looms were abandoned in the first place because they could not scale. “All of those factors that made people move away from selvedge denim are, once again, what’s limiting production.” Bahzad from Wonder Looper mirrored this sentiment when I spoke to him about his use of vintage loopwheel machines for shirtmaking.

But the looms aren’t the only variable in the equation.

Bloomberg reported last October that somewhere between ten and twenty Japanese denim factories have shut in recent years because owners aged out with no successor. Tokyo Weekender visited Yamaashi Orimono, a family mill in Ibara, and found every shuttle loom in the building maintained by one veteran technician, with the knowledge existing nowhere but in his head.

Chen notes the same thing. “We can add to that an aging workforce, less of a desire for young people to view this as a craft that they want to engage in. I think earlier on, five, ten years ago, we were like, oh, there’s such a high appreciation for craft in Japan. But they’re not that different from us. Young people want to go and try different things, and maybe they don’t want to do what their dad did.”

Small family businesses also face ordinary fragility. Nihon Menpu’s president passed away in July, so the mill with the most shuttle looms in Japan is in transition while the world waits with bated breath for its fabric shipments.

The Looms Are Not the Only Bottleneck

In Italy, or at Cone Mills when it existed, or at Vidalia, a brand approached the mill, spoke to the mill’s sales rep, and bought stock fabric or commissioned custom fabric.

Japan does not work that way, as Lam laid out. Almost all fabric moves through independent sales agencies. An agency represents several mills. Several agencies may represent a mill. The same fabric can appear through different agents at different prices, because the markup is the agent’s call. 3Sixteen has bought custom-woven Kuroki denim since around 2009 but has never bought it directly from Kuroki.

This convoluted network of indirect sales complicates communication by an order of magnitude. When an order timeline slips, the brand often cannot tell whether the delay is at the mill, at the agency, or somewhere in between. The brand might not find out about the delay at all. As Lam put it, what you learn depends entirely on how communicative your agent chooses to be, and Japanese business culture is not built around volunteering bad news. When Lam asked, ‘Why is this taking so long?’ there was simply no reply.

A Broader Squeeze

Demand is up. Bloomberg described soaring sales and global hype around Japanese denim. Large mall brands are asking mills for selvedge. If you’ve been watching this world for a decade, you can feel it.

NPR ran a segment on heritage denim in June that would have been unimaginable ten years ago, framing a $200 pair of Naked & Famous as an entry point and putting Chen on air to explain what a shuttle loom is to a general audience. Google interest in heritage denim jumped. Amy Leverton, a denim consultant and trend forecaster, tied it to economic anxiety. In moments of financial uncertainty, she said, people “either go straight to fast fashion and are trying to spend as little as possible on their clothing, or they romanticize the idea of, I’m going to just buy a pair of jeans and wear it forever.” She dates the last time selvedge trended to just after the 2008 market crash.

One telling signal is who is asking for denim now. Advance Denim, one of the large Chinese mills, told Sourcing Journal it is fielding selvedge requests from companies that have never served a heritage customer, naming Uniqlo and Loft. Selvedge has become a mainstream product attribute.

But is that ordinary growth enough to explain what happened to the calendar? A six-to-nine-month wait becoming forty months is not a proportional response to more people wanting jeans. It suggests something else may be sitting on top of it.

That something is the possibility Lam and Chen raised themselves: a small number of very large buyers booking loom time in volumes that didn’t exist before, taking capacity off the table ahead of everyone else. Their reasoning is hard to argue with. There were the same number of looms a few years ago, and it wasn’t taking this long. Something has changed on the buying side, not the weaving side.

From a consumer’s perspective, the end result is the same. Broad demand and concentrated booking both lead to an empty product page. But for small companies, it may be the difference between life and death.

How Brands Are Working Around the Shortage

Brands aren’t just sitting around waiting for the queue to clear. Here are some examples of how brands are securing their futures.

Fewer Fabrics, Stretched Further

The first move is consolidation. Instead of six fabrics across the line, a brand runs two, and puts them into more cuts and more products. It looks like editorial discipline. Often, it is a fabric order that didn’t arrive. 3Sixteen’s core denim going into a vintage wash program nearly doubled the brand’s consumption of a single cloth, which is exactly the pressure this creates.

The Return of Jobber Denim

If a mill runs too much of something, or a brand folds, or an order gets refused, the cloth goes to a jobber who buys in bulk and flips it, typically at thirty to sixty percent off list prices. Small brands that cannot meet mill minimums have always shopped in that secondary market. What is new is larger brands ending up there too. Lam described hearing that a supplier in Los Angeles brought in a quantity of one particular Japanese indigo selvedge variety, “and everybody’s just buying into it to make stuff out of because it’s the only thing that’s available.” It works for a capsule and fails for a core program, because you get what is there and then it is gone.

Looking Beyond Japan

Candiani in Italy weaves on upgraded 1960s shuttle looms. Chinese mills are building real selvedge programs, and Advance Denim says it is fielding requests from customers who never wanted selvedge before. Mount Vernon is weaving American selvedge in Georgia again. The catch is that none of it substitutes for a specific Japanese fabric.

Fabric doesn’t substitute the way a cut does. A cut can be copied, so take a pair you like to a pattern maker and you’ll get close. A specific cloth can’t. The yarn, the dye, the loom, the finishing, and the mill’s own habits make something another mill can approximate but never fully reproduce. That’s why a brand builds an identity on one fabric, and why it can’t swap in a Georgia equivalent and ship the same product. It’s also why Lam spent two years developing a second fabric, the new 5 series denim, instead of sourcing a replacement for the first. A brand that needs selvedge denim in the next twelve months has options that didn’t exist in 2020. A brand that needs its denim still doesn’t.

Letting Go Of Selvedge

Weight, weave density, cotton quality, and construction are what make a pair of jeans last. The self-finished edge signals that those things are usually present, but it is not a guarantee. A brand under supply pressure can put the same cotton at the same weight on a wide loom, sell it for less, and lose nothing a customer can feel from the outside.

Many brands have already started down this path: Sugar Cane, Buzz Rickson’s, Momotaro, Oni, Boncoura, Big John, Evisu, and even Iron Heart. Tellason has built a whole line on the cheaper version. The Tellason Stock line is made from 14oz sanforized non-selvedge Cone Mills denim, cut and sewn in San Francisco, $149 a pair, woven on a modern machine rather than vintage shuttle looms. Their explanation is refreshing. “(the fabrics) cost less than our customized selvedge fabrics, and it is our intention to pass the savings on to our customers.”

orSlow runs the other direction. Their 105 Standard Fit and 107 Ivy Fit both come in non-selvedge versions which cost more than their selvedge counterparts. Boncoura’s non-selvedge painter pants run past fifty thousand yen. These brands certainly don’t consider a faster loom a downgrade.

The Queue Becomes a Cash Flow Problem

The money side compounds the pain of the wait.

Christine Rucci, a supply chain consultant quoted by Sourcing Journal, walked through the arithmetic on imported fabric under the current tariff system: five dollars a yard at the mill lands on American shores at eighteen dollars. A pair of jeans takes about a yard and a half, so twenty-seven dollars of fabric, plus thirty-five minimum for cut-and-sew, five for trims, twenty for wash. Past seventy-eight dollars of factory cost before shipping, salaries, or margin. Rucci was referring to Chinese fabric, and prices for Japanese selvedge are even higher.

Historically, a brand paid up front, waited six to nine months for fabric, six to eight weeks to turn it into jeans, and thirty days to get paid by retailers. Their money was tied up for roughly a year. That was already a brutal commitment that required significant upfront capital. At current lead times, the same brand must commit cash against a delivery date three years out, based on a forecast of what customers will want in 2029. That is prohibitive, especially for newer or smaller brands that can’t run a business with no product or no return on investment for three years.

As Chen put it: “It is incredibly difficult to run a business where the core component of your core product takes this long to produce and is unpredictable.”

What This Means if You’re Buying Jeans

For buyers, the shortage will probably not arrive as a dramatic announcement. It will show up as a missing size, a fit that stops coming back, a fabric that never seems to restock, or a restock date that keeps moving.

The first thing to watch is variety. When fabric is scarce, brands put it toward the fits that sell. 3sixteen has already said this plainly. They have not made their slimmer cuts recently, and the most popular fit gets the fabric. If you wear a less common cut or a larger size, you will feel the shortage sooner than someone buying the house standard.

The second change is harder to read from the outside. New fabrics will not always mean a brand is expanding creatively. Sometimes they will. But sometimes experimentation is also a workaround. It can keep jeans in production when the usual fabric is stuck in a queue. The result can still be good, but it may not be the exact pair people were waiting for. Over the past few years, 3Sixteen has offered the 102x, 103x, and 203x, woven in partnership with a small mill in Hiroshima; the 222x miUSA, and the BF1x, made with cotton from Burkina Faso in partnership with an unnamed small mill.

The third thing to expect is price pressure. If fabric costs more, takes longer to secure, and ties up cash for years before a pair of jeans can be sold, some of that strain will eventually reach the retail price. Not every brand will raise prices at once, and some will absorb the hit for as long as they can. But the basic direction is hard to avoid. Scarcer fabric, longer waits, and more expensive production usually make the finished product more expensive too.

That changes the buying calculation. If the fabric, fit, and size are all right, waiting is riskier than it used to be. This does not mean panic-buying every limited release. The shortage also makes fit more important. If you order the wrong size and need an exchange, the replacement may not be there by the time the first pair comes back. The practical advice is not to buy more. Buy less casually and be an informed consumer. Know what you’re looking for, know your measurements, and be ready to order it when it becomes available.

This Is Not a Eulogy

This is not a decline story, yet. Demand for Japanese selvedge is strong enough to make the old machinery feel newly valuable, but not strong enough to make more of it appear. Mount Vernon is firing up their newly acquired Draper looms. Japanese mills are attracting more attention. Brands like 3Sixteen can build second supply relationships before the first one breaks. Those are real signs of adaptation and market success, not collapse. But none of them change the basic constraint. There are only so many shuttle looms; nobody is making more, and for the next several years the answer to “when will this be back in stock” may be a date that hurts your soul. If a pair of jeans in a fabric you love is sitting in your cart, this may be the time to stop waiting.