Although Roy Slaper was eventually anointed a “selvedge denim legend” by GQ magazine, he had no real interest in the apparel business when he started making jeans in his Oakland, California, apartment in the mid-2000s.
A metal fabricator by trade, he had no interest in denim, either.
“I had some jeans, but I liked wearing work slacks better,” he recalled in a 2012 interview with style and culture magazine Refueled.
“Sears made some good ones called Roebucks that I wore for years.”
But by 2008, Slaper (pronounced "slay-per"), who died in mid-July at 54, his friend Kiya Babzani said, was fully immersed in the denim business.
He was serving as the de facto CEO, designer, graphics guru, in-house repairman and the entire labour force for Roy denim.
Babzani declined to provide further details about Slaper’s death.
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For more than a decade, his one-man operation produced about 500 pairs of jeans a year, according to his own quirky schedule.
Each drop of 150 or 200 pairs would sell out within hours of hitting the shelves, as his jeans became coveted by the sort of haute denim-heads who are obsessed with obscure artisanal brands and whose tribal terminology – which focuses on intricate details like the crisscross fading behind the knees, known as “honeycombs” – rivals that of wine aficionados.
At about US$350 (approximately RM1,410) a pair, Roy jeans were considered “one of the holy grails of the denim world”, the site Denim Etc observed in 2013.
“I told Roy he could have sold them for US$800 (RM3,222), and they would have sold out in a day,” said Babzani, the co-founder of Slaper’s exclusive retailer, Self Edge, a San Francisco-based chain of clothing boutiques that is considered a go-to source for premium Japanese brands like Iron Heart and The Flat Head.
Slaper’s unlikely fashion odyssey began with his love of machinery.
“I have a very intimate relationship with my machines,” he said in the early days of the brand in an interview with menswear and design site Grain & Gram.
“I don’t see them as wholly inanimate.”
By the mid-2000s, he had collected several antique industrial sewing machines that were specifically built to make jeans.
He taught himself to sew and, still working days in a metal shop, began crafting jeans at night and on weekends.
“The truth is that I didn’t know why I was doing it,” he said in a 2010 interview with the site Leafbox. “I was just very driven toward making the jeans.”
He added: “To me, making clothing, designing, sewing and machine repair are all one subject. I really enjoy the machinery. Getting a total basket-case machine and fixing it is right up there on the beauty scale.”
Eventually, Slaper had accumulated so many machines in his tiny apartment that he cleared out all the furniture, with the exception of a foam pad that he cut to use as a bed, menswear site Heddels reported in 2013.
Later, he moved the operation to a studio.
Slaper delighted purists by using heavy loomstate (or untreated) selvedge denim produced on old-fashioned Draper X3 shuttle looms from the storied, and now shuttered, Cone Mills White Oak plant in Greensboro, North Carolina.
With those traditional looms, he was able to make selvedge jeans – identifiable by the coloured (often red) thread along the outer seam that is visible when the jeans are rolled – from denser, richer fabric prized by the initiated.
Roy jeans had a wider, 1940s-style fit, as well as distinctive touches like hand-hammered copper rivets, freehand, chain-stitched detailing and pocket linings made from heavy loomstate cotton and other rugged fabrics.
According to site Cool Hunting, Roy denim represented, in the US, “what may be the pinnacle of denim craftsmanship”.
Slaper, who marketed only men’s jeans, started his company at a fortuitous time.
Beginning in the mid-2000s, heritage clothing – 1940s-style workwear; checked wool shirts; stiff, indigo-soaked selvedge jeans costing hundreds of dollars, often rolled at the cuff – became a definitive look for young urban creative types.
It was known as lumberjack chic.
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Then, as now, online style forums like Superfuture crackled with debates on esoteric topics like slub patterns (irregularities in the fabric) and whiskers (horizontal fading patterns usually found around the front pocket areas that were earned with wear).
Slaper may have catered to that crowd, but he did not necessarily consider himself a part of it.
“They have all this terminology,” he told Grain & Gram. “It’s like they’re talking another language.”
Roy Patrick Slaper was born Dec 22, 1971, in El Paso, Texas, to Roger Slaper and Kathrin (Gill) Slaper.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t care about school, I didn’t care about girls, I didn’t care about anything but skateboarding,” he told Grain & Gram.
That passion eventually led him to California, an epicentre of skateboarding.
When he started making jeans, “it was the total skateboarder’s approach to it”, he added in the Grain & Gram interview.
“You don’t go to skateboard classes, you kind of just pick it up. You see what other people are doing, you read Thrasher.”
Initially, he told Refueled, “This was no business venture. It was more like building a time machine or a boat in my basement. It wasn’t until I started showing people that some folks wanted to actually pay for them.”
Slaper eventually made enough money selling jeans to leave the metal shop, and branched out into men’s chambray shirts, bags and other items. Wearying of the grind, he retired in 2021.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
In his Leafbox interview, Slaper remembered reassuring a friend early on that he was not in the jeans business for the money.
He recalled his friend’s response: “As he put it, ‘OK, good, you’re doing it for the love – because if you’re not, you won’t make a penny.’” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
