Asamerry has been a summer undershirt for more than 70 years. That comfort does not come from good cotton alone.
We went to Wakayama to watch it being made. To Hanwa, who knit the fabric, and to our own Fujibo Textile mill, where it is dyed and finished.
Knitting to the Character of the Yarn
The fabric is knitted by Hanwa, a mill that has worked in Wakayama's circular-knitting district for decades.
What stayed with us first, as the plant manager talked us through it, was the yarn itself.
Asamerry starts with 110-count two-ply cotton. We twist it hard, then pass it through a gas flame to burn off the surface fuzz. That is where our signature shari textured feel comes from, crisp in the hand and light against the skin.
A hard twist gives the thread a firm, springy structure, so the knit meets your skin at fewer points. Air moves through it, and it follows the body without gripping.
A hard twist is not an easy thing to knit with.
Let the yarn go slack and the twist springs back on itself into a kink, which can stop the machine or spoil the fabric. The knitters run snarl guards along the yarn path and adjust the machine tension by small degrees to keep it from happening.
Then the plant manager said something that stayed with us.
"Yarn is a living thing."
Humidity and the conditions on the day move the yarn a little, and the settings have to move with it. Reading a difference that small, and knowing what to do about it, is what years at the machine buy you.
The stitch density is unusual too. Asamerry is knitted loose, which is what makes the fabric thin, light, and open enough for air to pass through.
Knitting loose is also what makes it difficult. Even stitches take constant small corrections, and because the tension on the machine changes with the garment size, each size is knitted on the machine suited to it.
A knitting machine for Asamerry runs more than 1,000 needles. Setting each one, and configuring how the fabric is knitted, is done by hand.
The machine looks like it is making the fabric on its own. A single length of it is really a stack of small hand corrections.
Gas-singed yarn also sheds fine debris as it knits, so fans clear it and the machines are cleaned often. That upkeep exists because of this yarn.
Good cotton and good yarn do not turn into good fabric by themselves. Someone has to understand what the yarn wants, and keep asking how to get the most out of it. That is the other half of the quality.
Dyeing Starts Long Before the Color
From there the fabric goes to our dyeing and finishing mill in Wakayama.
Fujibo Textile is one of our own mills, and it has been dyeing and finishing cloth for a long time, to standards set by brands all over the world.
Dyeing sounds like the step where the color goes on. Most of it happens before that.
Fabric coming off the knitting machine carries machine oil and fine debris, so it is scoured and bleached clean first. Only then does it take color.
From there it is watched. Is the color even. Has the cloth taken it uniformly. Has anything been damaged along the way. Machines check, and so do people, at every stage.
Asamerry has run for more than 70 years, so some things have been held and some have changed.
White undergarments used to be bleached with chlorine. They are now bleached with hydrogen instead, which keeps the white that belongs to Asamerry while asking less of the environment.
It is not done in one pass. The cloth is checked as the bleaching goes, so the fabric is not pushed harder than it needs to be.
Keeping a quality that is more than 70 years old, and making it the way it should be made now. The mill takes both seriously, and that is what stayed with us.
Why the Fabric Stays a Tube
There is one more thing about Asamerry.
The cloth is knitted as a tube, and it stays a tube. Most mills slit a knitted tube open and lay it flat before dyeing. We dye and finish ours whole.
Slitting the tube open is standard practice. Flat fabric is more versatile, and you can cut several sizes efficiently out of one width.
We do not do it. Keeping the tube means there is no side seam, which is one less thing sitting against the skin all day. It also means fewer cuts, so less of a scarce fabric is lost.
Dyeing and finishing a tube takes machines built for it, and people who know those machines.
Cloth out of the dye bath still holds its creases. It is fed through a machine and brought back to an even width with heat and steam.
Then it goes to sewing.
Each step is finished carefully, and each step is also handed on in a state the next person can work with. That handover is treated as part of the making.
What a Length of Fabric Carries
What we came away with, after two mills, is that the quality of Asamerry does not rest on any one skill.
Someone knits to the state of the yarn. Someone corrects the stitch density and the tension. Someone scours, bleaches, and dyes. Someone checks the color by eye. Someone brings the tube back into shape and hands it on.
Every step has its own skill behind it, and every step had the same thing in common: people who care about this one product.
More than 70 years in, that does not mean doing it the old way. It means taking up a better method when there is one, and not letting the comfort change.
You cannot see any of this in the finished undershirt. It is in the hours before it, and those hours are part of what we are sending you.