Levi's Men's 501 Shrink To Fit Jean

If you're looking for the old-fashioned style Levi 501 jeans like the ones you bought in the 1970's or 80's, that are made of heavy denim and you bought them oversize and washed them hot to shrink them to size, at least one of the ones listed on this page is the right one: the Color: Rigid STF (at the moment it is the color at the far left).

It took many hours of searching and researching (researching blue jeans!) at several online stores and non-store websites to determine whether equivalents to my old ones were even made anymore, and if so, which ones they were. Levi calls countless styles Classic or Classic Fit, and countless others Original, and the 501 number was apparently successful, so they call a lot of them 501, too, to the point where these adjectives and style number have no meaning anymore. Classic and Original probably just mean they're Levi-Strauss, and 501 is meant to catch your eye. Maybe they hope you'll make lots of mistakes and have to buy lots of jeans while hoping to find the right ones. If it sounds like I'm joking about that, I'm not.

So it was with some relief that I got these, saw that they're the right style, shrank them down, and they're fine. There is even an improvement over the old ones: the button-fly holes are now are reinforced with stitching, which they didn't used to be. Mine say Made in Haiti; quality seems just fine. The denim is heavy-weight.

If you're looking for the type of old-fashioned plain style jeans that I described, the keywords to look for are: Rigid, Indigo, Shrink-To-Fit/STF, Straight Leg, Button-Fly, Rivets, and 501 (even though it can mean almost anything). When you're looking at an item description, the more of these keywords are omitted, the more suspicious you can be that you may be looking at an "impostor", possibly even an impostor style made by Levi itself.

Shop carefully. It wasn't an accident that I ended up with the ones I set out to buy. It took more than a day of traversing the Levi-Strauss style minefield.

These are still made from the original indigo-dyed rigid denim manufactured Cone mills in North Carolina, and are of good quality. The trick with these is to buy a bigger size then you ordinarily would, as they shrink considerably. Especially if you want to be able to roll up the cuffs, you need to buy either 2 or 4 inches longer in the inseam, i.e. if you normally wear a 32, by a thirty-four or 36, because it will shrink almost 3 inches after a couple of washes. If you want to wear them over boots, definitely go up 4 inches. I have found that the waist shrinks about an inch and half, so if you normally buy a 36, buy 38. The other thing is that if you want to avoid whitish streaking down the leg, turn them inside out when you wash them. To avoid spotting from the starch used in new shrink-to-fit fabric, wash then in hot water the first few time. Basically they will shrink through the first three washes and and pretty much stay where they are. After that, when you get them to the color you want, wash them as infrequently as possible and they will get a nice natural fading, which will look much better than any of the "hand finished" jeans they charge so much for nowadays. It will always look better if you do it yourself through natural wear.

I have found that these shrink a bit less than what Levi's says. In the waist, they shrink about an inch as opposed to the tho inches that Levi's says. The leg shrinks about 2 3/4 inches, rather than 4. So don't buy them too oversized, unless you are going to be washing many times in hot water and a hot drier. Since most people like these dark nowadays, that is unlikely. Also, these are very well made. While much negative commentary concerning Levi Strauss's move away from domestic manufacturing has focused on the button-fly 501s, the bigger problem I have seen is with the old 1970's standby, the 505, which has a zipper as opposed to button fly. The variability on sizing and sew quality with the 505s means you really have to try them on to see how they fit. The 501 are much easier to buy online or by mail order because the sizing is much less critical on the waist, which is the so-called "anti-fit" waist, meaning there is no curve to the rise (the distance between the crotch and the top of the waist), because the original 501s were merely cut down bib overalls which were made to hang, rather than be fitted to the waist. The biggest problem I have noted on the 505's is the variability in size in the thigh area, meaning that some fit baggy and some seem rather tight, even though they are theoretically the same size of a label. The 501s are pretty safe as far as sizing.