Superfuture and the Fashion World of the Secret Internet

In 2005, Chris Zaldua was a college student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, when he discovered Superfuture. He had been searching for information on selvedge denim, the kind of jeans made from vintage looms that mostly existed in Japan. In North America, where the process of hunting for vintage selvedge denim was like crate digging at record stores, a subculture formed comprising peer-vetted aficionados who passed down shared knowledge (and with it taste) that accumulated and distributed across a loose, oral network that was only beginning to map itself online. Wearers took to cuffing their jeans at the ankle, revealing the inner selvedge weave like a cryptic insignia only recognizable to other initiates.