Haraken-san visits TCB once a year, usually combining the trip with his business trips.
One day, I spotted in his Instagram stories the face of a duck with a delightfully goofy, charming expression.
Judging by the look of it, it didn't seem to be an incredibly old piece.Even so, the moment I saw it, I thought "This would make a perfect matching set with the Cat Head Jacket."
I explained the situation, and he was kind enough to let me have it.
For me, it was a stroke of incredible luck—a "duck carrying leek" moment, as the Japanese idiom goes (meaning a perfect, unexpected opportunity arriving right on cue).
Maybe you know this from the pokemon, Farfetch'd
It likely dates back to around the 1960s. Since the Cat Head Jacket is based on coveralls from the 1930s and 40s, there is a slight chronological gap between the Cathead Jacket we make. However, I decided to embrace that discrepancy as part of the creative process.
If it hadn't been for that duck, I might never have examined these 1960s painter pants so closely. Upon closer inspection, I noticed decorative stitching on the back pockets and chain-stitching along the pocket openings. While the main seams feature the triple-stitched lap seams typical of painter pants, the back yoke is sewn with double stitching.
Compared to pre-war coveralls or painter pants, the stitch spacing is noticeably wider. This brings me to a topic I often find myself discussing when talking about workwear.
When manufacturing workwear in the 1960s, the focus wasn't just on durability; manufacturers were also prioritizing rationality and production efficiency.
For straight seams, they used chain-stitching, which eliminated the need to worry about running out of bobbin thread. High-stress areas were reinforced with triple stitching, while the back yoke—subject to relatively less strain—was double-stitched to conserve thread.Furthermore, since finer stitching takes longer to cover the same distance, they used wider stitch spacing to shave precious seconds off the sewing time.I actually counted the number of stitches per inch to see for myself. Compared to pre-war coveralls, these 1960s painter pants feature two fewer stitches per inch. While a difference of just two stitches might seem negligible, fewer stitches mean a longer distance can be sewn in the same amount of time, and less thread is consumed. A slight variation on a single pair becomes a significant difference when considering factory-scale production of hundreds or thousands of units.
This kind of manufacturing efficiency ultimately created the distinctive look characteristic of that era—another reason why vintage workwear is so fascinating. For this release, we used the same denim fabric as the jacket, allowing them to be worn together as a matching set.
The Cat Head—previously available only as a standalone jacket—finally has its perfect partner in these pants.
