Samuel Ku and the Future of Denim

Published in the April issue

Denim, unlike cars or medicine or game shows, is not an area of life where most men welcome innovation. Give us some variation on the all-cotton, indigo-dyed jeans that the old-timers wore in the Gold Rush and we're all set. And yet there are jeans today that fit better, feel better, and look better than your average pair specifically because somebody decided to try something new, and as the design director of AG Adriano Goldschmied, Samuel Ku has been trying to find the something new that will revolutionize how we wear jeans.

Ku got into the denim business the old-fashioned way — he was born into it. As the son of a major denim manufacturer in southern California, he grew up watching people who cut, sew, wash, and detail jeans for a living. And when he graduated from UC Irvine in 2001 with an economics degree that he had no idea what to do with, he went to work for AG, the denim line that his father had recently cofounded with an Italian designer named Adriano Goldschmied. ("Some people refer to [Goldschmied] as the godfather of premium denim," says Ku. "Usually I just tell people he was a cofounder of Diesel, and they kind of get it.") He started in the R&D lab, experimenting with different washes and treatments, and he gradually worked his way up through the ranks. When Goldschmied, until then the brand's creative director, left the partnership in 2004 and the Ku family bought his share of the trademark, AG went through a few design directors before Ku took over in 2008.

His first task was to change what he saw as the "blue jeans are blue jeans" mentality among American consumers. "The typical guy would say, 'A pair of blue jeans is 100 percent cotton, it's 14-ounce denim, it's heavy and sturdy and doesn't change.' ... I don't think most of us really understand how much blue jeans actually change from one year to the next." And so he set in motion a plan to change how AG produces denim. His designers now use laser-burning technology to create subtle, authentic-looking distress marks; they use ever-changing chemical treatments to produce distinct washes; and they source fabrics from cutting-edge mills for jeans that fit close to the body yet don't feel uncomfortably close. "There are a ton of advanced fibers and different stretch components that people are using to give comfort and stretchability... Every day we're innovating and we're figuring things out."

All these innovations come together in the new AG-ed Reserve limited-edition collection. Instead of producing any given style of jeans by the thousands, Ku has given his designers free rein to experiment with aggressive distressing and unorthodox coloring techniques, and AG will produce only 250 pairs of each design. The results may not look like your average pair of jeans, but that's exactly Ku's goal. "There are so many ways that you can apply these new techniques that there's almost an infinite number of unique styles that we can create." And you can bet that if jeans look any different in 50 years, it'll be because of thinking like that.

Cotton jeans ($215 to $395) by AG Adriano Goldschmied.

PLUS: How to Wear Jeans >>

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