This article originally appeared in our November 2015 print edition. 

At the Hartford Denim Company (aka Hardenco), jeans are not just made; they are built.

That is, they are constructed from raw selvedge denim, which means that the fabric has a self-finished edge and doesn’t unravel or fray. It also means these jeans are built to last, because Hardenco extends a unique offer with each pair: a lifetime of free repairs.

“The jeans you find at a mall are ‘stonewashed,’ which means they’re run through a huge washer with volcanic rocks, which practically destroys them,” says Hardenco co-founder Marshall Deming with a sigh of dismay.

If you want “distressed” jeans from Hardenco, you’re going to have to distress them the old-fashioned way—by putting the wear on them yourself.

Deming, 31, founded the company in 2010 with high school friends Luke Davis and Dave Marcoux. “We see jeans as a tool to protect you from the elements and from hard jobs. Jeans also make a simple lifestyle statement. . .you know, a pair of jeans, some boots, and a shirt is all you really need.”

The idea for making jeans began when Deming and his two buddies from Conard High in West Hartford went camping. They’d sit around and make wallets and belts, and then Davis began deconstructing pants to learn how they were made.

A lanky, bearded free spirit who hustles around the 3,000-square-foot workshop in his bare feet, Deming declares that he and his partners are “100 percent self-taught. We started off in each other’s garages. Finally, a friend’s father, who had one of the last sewing shops in Hartford, let us use his cutting room.”

Image courtesy of Hardenco

Five years and three working spaces later, they’re ensconced in the basement of an old brick factory on Bartholomew Avenue in Hartford’s energetic, eclectic Parkville neighborhood. The workshop both embodies and ennobles Hartford’s rich history, when sewing factories were running round the clock. Inside its dusty corners can be found a museum’s worth of antique tools and machines the trio have collected over the years that are now being put back into operation.

Every pair of Hardenco jeans is handmade by a full-time staff of five (which includes the three co-founders), who also make travel bags and shop aprons (George Dickel Tennessee Whisky buys 300 of these at a time to give out as promotional bartending aprons). “Built in Hartford, Connecticut” is stamped on the inside of each completed pair of jeans, and a distinctive leather patch in the shape of Connecticut is sewn above the back pocket.

The retail price for a pair of Hardenco jeans is $235. They also sell factory seconds and older stock for far less (just visit the showroom). The company receives orders from all over the world, even the unlikeliest of places.

“One order that came from a guy in Siberia brought tears to my eyes,” says Deming. “We are the only ones who sell raw denim jeans in his size, 42 waist. Most stop at 38. He told us about the first pair he ever had. It took him four months working in a monastery to save up enough money to get them. They came to him stiff in the carton, and he said he would never forget that smell when he took them out and held them up. He called it ‘the smell of freedom.’”

Hardenco – Hartford Denim Company
Hartford, Connecticut
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Top photo by Chion Wolf, courtesy WNPR

The post Built to Last appeared first on Take Magazine.

Even if you’ve never ridden a motorcycle, you find yourself wanting to pick up this gorgeous, independent magazine on vintage-bike culture. As you leaf through enticingly photographed articles about treks through Indonesia, handmade leather boots, or an adman-turned-microdistiller, you might wonder where this bookshelf-worthy journal in your hands comes from. London? Los Angeles? Nope. Manchester, New Hampshire.

Granite State native Brett Houle launched Iron & Air in 2012 after selling his email marketing company, SendLabs. The concept started out as an Instagram feed, then a Facebook page that attracted thousands of likes. Before long, Houle, editor-in-chief Adam Fitzgerald, and digital director Greg Moore were responding to their followers’ demand for a magazine dedicated to the concept they were cultivating on social media. Issues 1 through 3 were digital. With issue 4, the print publication was born.
“They want something in tangible form,” Fitzgerald says of Iron & Air’s audience. “They work with their hands. They’re craftspeople and motorsports enthusiasts. They care about where their stuff comes from, how it’s made.”

The quarterly has tapped into the international revival of “café racer” culture centered on “motorcycles that look like something out of an old Steve McQueen movie,” as Popular Mechanics recently put it. “These bikes revive the 1960s café-racer look made popular when European kids stripped down their small-displacement bikes to zip from one café hangout to another.”

“We don’t like to think of ourselves as a motorcycle magazine,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s about the motorcycle and the places it takes us—the adventures, the trips, the people you meet, the clothes you wear when you’re on the road.” Indeed, the name of the magazine came from Houle’s desire to describe his favorite things, motorcycles and mountains, in more evocative terms.

The editorial team has lit upon non-motorcycle topics that strike a chord with Iron & Air readers as the publication has “matured,” says Fitzgerald, chuckling as Moore winces over a word that is about as attractive to a biker as “minivan.” A recent feature, for example, looked at an exhibit of obscure photographs by the film director Stanley Kubrick. Issue 22, which came out this spring, is entirely devoted to the gritty romance of a 10,000-mile trip around the American West on Russian-made Ural sidecar motorbikes.

“We take advantage of the fact that we are an independent publication,” says Fitzgerald. “We push boundaries. Who’s going to stop us?

THIS PIECE FIRST APPEARED OUR JUNE/JULY 2016 PRINT ISSUE AVAILABLE HERE

Images courtesy of Iron & Air

The post Live to Ride appeared first on Take Magazine.