Japan's jeans coveted

TRUE BLUE TRADITION: WOVEN ON EDO LOOMS, DYED WITH NATURAL INDIGO

It's an antidote to fast fashion: Japanese jeans hand-dyed with natural indigo and woven on a clackety vintage loom, then sold at a premium to global denim connoisseurs.

Unlike their mass-produced cousins, the tough garments crafted at the small Momotaro Jeans factory in southwest Japan are designed to be worn for decades and come with a lifetime repair warranty.

On site, Yoshiharu Okamoto dips cotton strings into a tub of deep blue liquid. The cotton is imported from Zimbabwe, but the natural indigo they use is harvested in Japan—its color far richer than synthetic imitations.

Okamoto calls it a "time-consuming and costly" method used to dye kimonos in the 17th-19th century Edo period.