I’ve been fortunate to be in a position in the past to buy two pairs of Hiut jeans. I like them because they fit well and look good, because I like the company’s schtick and its championing of local crafts-based skills and communities, and, of course, because all that resonates with the image I have of myself.
But I also like them because they offer a free repair service, in-keeping with their, and, increasingly, our, mission to redress the balance away from disposability. Jeans get ripped? Chuck ’em.
Not with Hiut. My original 2012 pair have already been back once to have the crotch repaired, and when my newer pair started to go too, as well as early parenthood having ripped the left knee of the first, they both went back at once.
And look at the results below. They’re beautiful. It’s neither trying to make the jeans look good as new, nor is it kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of explicitly highlighting repairs. They have developed their own robustly unique character and identity, organically, and if you’ll indulge me, it’s one of the quiet dignity that comes from having worked hard and still had care and attention lavished on them. I love that in repairing the knee – which was an gaping inches-long gash in the fabric – they’ve even colour-matched the thread to the worn patch on the knee. (New, the jeans are a dark indigo, and they fade and scuff and soften slowly with use.) They even tidied up the fraying hems, though I hadn’t asked them to.
Hiut has a customer for life in me. I can’t justify another pair just now, but though I was tempted to cheat with another label in the weeks during which these two were off being repaired, I knew they wouldn’t please me anything like as much as they do.