Full Count

As a member of the original Osaka 5 (Google is your friend), Full Count’s reputation as a legendary and influential brand is firmly cemented in denim lore, regardless of what they do from here on out.

Not one to rest on his laurels however, founder Mikiharu Tsujita has been innovating since 1992. A fan of American vintage Levis of the ‘40s and ‘50s, Tsujita-san first set out to try and exactly reproduce the beautiful, slubby fabric that Levi’s once used. This quest for what he viewed as the perfect denim took him over three years, and even down to the microscopic level. He tells of literally dismantling, thread by thread, pairs of vintage Levis and studying the individual fibers of the cotton itself, eventually discovering that the cotton staple used in vintage jeans was much longer than what could be found in the commercial cotton strains available today. If the cotton itself was no longer available, how then to faithfully reproduce the denim of a bygone era? Enter Zimbabwean cotton. Tsujita-san scoured the globe and tried many different types of cotton, but knew he had hit the mark when he discovered hand-cropped, long-staple Zimbabwean cotton. Indeed he was the first in Japan to make jeans using this type of cotton. He finally had the raw materials with which to reproduce his beloved vintage wear. It’s worth noting however that Full Count now uses several types of cotton in their jeans.

Full Count tends to use simple, clean designs, without superfluous hardware or unneeded details. In the name of comfort and daily wearability they generally keep things light, relatively speaking, and do not produce the ultra-heavy denim that some of the other brands are putting out, though they do now make new midweight “super rough” and “straight Slub” denim to compliment their normal lines. One of Tsujita-san’s concepts is to continue his five base models indefinitely as he has been for years now, the idea being that once your favorite pair of Full Count’s wear out you can head out and buy the exact same model. Full Count also offers a dizzying array of items aside from jeans – check them out!