Triple Speed Time.
Photos: Renz Dimaandal (@renz.jpg)
Model: Brett Su (@brettsu)
Car: Gregory Park (@greg0rypark)
Production: Practice Days
This Thursday, we release a special collaboration with Samurai and Self Edge. This project is a bit of a full circle moment for us as Self Edge has played such a big role in bringing our raw denim program to prominence not only stateside but internationally. But before that happened, it was Samurai that served as the very first jumping off point for our love for Japanese denim when Johan Lam first visited Self Edge almost two decades ago.
The concept for the collaboration is built around a shared love for Japanese cars and tuning. Samurai has a racing team that has been building Japanese cars for two decades, and the founder Tohru Nogami boasts a personal collection of vintage JDM cars, including a 3rd and 4th gen Corolla. Stateside, Self Edge and 3sixteen team members have enjoyed tuning Toyotas and Hondas over the years, so the idea to tie this project into our automotive passions was an easy decision. We came up with a fictional car club called “The Redliners” - a bit of a double entendre referring to both a classic selvedge ID as well as pushing a car to its limits. We turned to our good friend Matthew Vu, a designer based in Portland, OR, to establish what the visual identity of the club would look like. He designed the club logo and a graphic t-shirt inspired by JDM tuning garages, complete with a schematic sketch of a Toyoda G3 shuttle loom on the back. The graphic is a nod to an old Alphanumeric tee with a legendary Honda engine printed on it in the exact sample style of illustration. The tee features our flagship heavyweight jersey that’s knit in Canada and sewn in the US, but the pocket detailing and fit reference Samurai tees.
The denim, of course, is the focal point of the collaboration; the three of us designed an incredible 15oz loomstate denim featuring medium staple Texas cotton warp fibers and a blend of unbleached Greek, Australian and US short fibers for the weft thread. Showcasing stunning texture and complexity in a way that we’ve all come to expect from Samurai, we are proud to introduce an original fabric that is custom woven specifically for this project. The denim is woven at medium to low tension to achieve the nep and texture on the fabric, and is finished with a charcoal selvedge ID with silver lame thread. The jeans and coach’s jacket have been garment rinsed to eliminate shrinkage. We especially love the patch and pocket flasher artwork, which features the tagline “Triple Speed Time” alongside three Toyotas: a Celica Supra, an MR2, and a Celica. Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, founded in 1926, eventually paved the way for the Toyota Motor Corporation.
We applied this denim to two pairs of jeans - a wide fit and a straight tapered fit - as well as a coach's jacket. The jeans feature Samurai's sterling silver-plated sakura shanks, WWII-era mismatched copper rivets, and ShoGyo-Mujo jacquard pocket bags. The coach's jacket features a waist drawstring, enamel-coated snaps, raglan sleeves, elastic cuffs, and a Samurai Motor Club tag alongside the heavyweight leather patch.
For our photoshoot, we wanted to call back to early 2000’s import tuning culture: hitting up car shows, rolling out to drag races, propping up hoods in parking lots. The production company we worked with, Practice Days, connected us with Gregory Park. He lives in Los Angeles and owns - among many other beautiful cars - a pristine 1994 NSX-R. Only 400 examples of this car were produced for the Japanese market, and Gregory was kind enough to loan the car to us for our shoot. We took some photos in the parking garage at ROW DTLA and on property, all while dodging security throughout the evening - not so far off from our street racing days. Johan and Andrew spent some time last week chatting about the project and reflecting on the history and the inspiration behind it on our podcast, Singularities. You can listen to it now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The Self Edge x Samurai x 3sixteen “Triple Speed Time” capsule collection releases on Thursday, April 17th. You can find it in store at all 3sixteen and Self Edge stores, and online via 3sixteen.com and selfedge.com.