Item Spotlight: Executed With Pride
A pair of tan five pocket pants, button fly, straight leg, cut like a jean and made of something that is not denim. Tag size 30, 28 in inseam, 39 in outseam, 7.5 in leg opening. Made in Japan by a brand most people outside Japan have never heard of, which is the reason it gets the post.
The object
Slub cotton. That is the whole trick. Slub is yarn spun with deliberate thick and thin sections, so the woven fabric has an uneven, ropey surface that reads as texture from across a room. Cut it into a classic five pocket pattern with a button fly, rivets, and a leather back patch, and you get a pant that behaves like a jean and photographs like linen. Cootie's own hardware on the fly buttons and rivets, a waistband tag that reads Royal Quality Cootie Satisfaction Guaranteed. Fading and creasing in the cotton from wear, hardware intact, no holes, no stains.
Who Cootie is
Cootie Productions started in Tokyo in 2000. Two people: Gohei Yamamoto as president and Tetsuo Otsuka as designer. Otsuka left in June 2017 to do his own thing, and the brand kept going under Yamamoto. The stated idea has stayed the same for 26 years: American casual clothing from the 1940s onward, remade in Japan with the proportions corrected and the palette stripped down to black, white, gray, and the colors in between. Fashion Press files them as American casual through a contemporary lens. That is accurate and it undersells how strict the palette is. A tan pant is about as loud as Cootie gets.
The name. A cootie is a louse. The brand's own gloss is that cootie is slang for a single-minded drive toward status and honor, which is a generous reading of a word most Americans learned on a playground. Take it as the brand telling you what it wants the word to mean, not what the dictionary says.
The tags do a lot of talking. Executed With Pride on an orange hem tag. Elder Brand Quality stamped into a shank button. Garment Workers, Est. 2000. Royal Quality, Satisfaction Guaranteed. It is workwear copy borrowed from 1940s American labels and printed by a Tokyo company in the 2000s, and it is deliberate. The clothes are plain. The tags carry the story.
The Kj thing
Japanese fan coverage of Kenji Furuya, the Dragon Ash frontman everyone calls Kj, lists Cootie as one of his signature brands and says he has worn it since the brand started. Shirts and jackets mostly. The listing calls this the Cootie cloth pant, the cut associated with him. I could not find a source that puts him in this exact pant on this exact date, so read that as the cut people connect to him, not a documented outfit. If you came to Cootie through Dragon Ash, you already know. If you did not, Dragon Ash is a Tokyo rock and hip hop band that has been running since the late 90s, and the black Levi's 501s and Red Wing Pecos boots Kj wore got copied by a generation of Japanese men.
What it is worth, honestly
Yahoo Auctions Japan closed about 123 Cootie pant listings in the last 180 days. Average 8,703 yen, range 980 to 35,900. Older work pants and chinos close in the 3,000 to 8,000 yen band. Current season shin cut slacks and wide pants close near 20,000. So a used Cootie pant in Japan, domestic, is usually a 5,000 to 8,000 yen object, which is $35 to $55 before a proxy fee and shipping, and before the part where you find one in your size in tan.
Price here is $150. That is above the domestic used range and I am telling you so. What you pay for is a made in Japan five pocket in a fabric most brands do not bother with, already in the country, in a 30. If you want to proxy one from Japan for less, that is a fair choice and a three week wait. This one ships this week.
Cootie Productions five pocket slub cotton pants, tan, 30
The rest of the Cootie shelf
Four Cootie pieces listed this week. The other three, one line each.
MO164 gray work pants, size M. Trouser pockets, button fly, the orange Executed With Pride hem tag and the Elder Brand Quality button. About 32 in waist, 29 in inseam. $150.
Logo oversized football crewneck, washed black, size M. Pigment dyed so the fade came from the factory, 23.5 in chest, boxy on purpose. $150.
Honeycomb waffle thermal, gray, size S. The Garment Workers, Est. 2000 tag is on this one. Excellent condition. $70.
That is the brand in four garments: two pants, a sweatshirt, a thermal, all in gray, tan, and black. Nothing on them shouts. The tags do the shouting.