I haven’t done a jeans review here on Sarah Vain and Tall and there are a few reasons for that.
Even if I were of average height, I’d still be difficult to fit, having a large hip relative to my waist — I can take a 10 and a 14 at once so jeans that fit around the hip usually gape something horrible at the waist. So although there are fabulous tall jeans companies in Australia, I can’t wear any of the jeans I’ve tried from them in the past.
I’ve been using a company called Make Your Own Jeans. The idea behind the company is great: you choose every little detail from the denim to the pocket seam. They cost around $70 for one pair with shipping and take three weeks to make.
Where Make Your Own Jeans fails is in execution and quality control. The first pair I had from them was stunning. The fit was perfect and the length (I ordered a 39″ inseam just for fun) was just right for high heels. So when they wore out I ordered two more with exactly the same specs. Wouldn’t you?
They were atrocious. Like, fabric hanging off my butt AND a wedgie AT THE SAME TIME levels of bad. But I had two weeks until my honeymoon, a walking holiday in the bush, and no other pants. At all. So I had no time to send them back or ask for a do-over; instead I took them to a tailor and had them altered extensively at a cost of $100 each. I know. I felt like such a sucker, but what else could I do?
Pair one has been tolerable, with alterations, and I’ve been wearing them for the last few months. Pair two wasn’t so great so I didn’t wear them until this Saturday when pair one was in the wash. So: we’re due to meet friends for dinner. I do the hair, the makeup, you know the drill, I grab the new jeans and put together an outfit that will work. We’re running on time, but just. I pop in to the bathroom just before we leave, unzip my jeans… and the zipper flies right off.
Agh. Cursing ensues.
So Monday was the perfect day to try out something new. Thank you, Sally, for pointing it out! Jeans West have an ‘extra long’ service with 38″ unhemmed jeans. You can go into any Jeans West store and try on their standard jeans, then order them in the extra talls from their web site. They’re $65 or $99 for two, with $10 postage. Which makes them cheap as well as long.
Could it really be true? I hit the buy button on Monday and then spent Tuesday wondering if I’d done a crazy thing. But no. The jeans are exactly like those that I tried on in the store, but with enough extra inches that I can hem them for heels or flats. They’re exactly like ‘normal’ jeans, which I LOVE because I got to choose a fit that worked for me. I also really appreciated being able to try before I bought. You can check out the extra tall range here.
People often ask me if I intend to do denim in the SVT range, and the answer is no, or rather, not while I’m a one woman company. Jeans are a whole art form in themselves. Everyone likes theirs “just so”, and as a result so every denim company needs to keep many fits, washes and sizes in stock (which is expensive). There are whole shelves of design books dedicated to denim and the fashions change in the blink of an eye. They can’t be sewn on the kind of equipment the average sewing shop keeps around. AND, special machinery is needed for each of the many kinds of wash that define fashion jeans.
Put more simply, denim is a specialised industry. Complicating this even further, is the very specific fit of any jean which is tricky to get right with online shopping.
It’s taken until now for an Australian jeans company to realise that the best business model, is for an existing denim specialist to cut their normal range in extra talls and offer them online. Thus we can try them on and have confidence in online ordering, but they don’t have to keep extra longs in every store. It’s a win-win.
The jeans pictured are “curve enhancer”, which is close to perfect for me.
but it’s not black, so it’s got automatic points.