Roy Slaper, the Oakland artisan who built an international following by making bespoke selvedge jeans entirely by himself, died in July 2026 at the age of 54.

Roy Slaper, founder of Oakland's Roy Denim label, died in July 2026 at 54. He was born in 1971. No cause of death has been made public, according to SFGate, which published an obituary.

For roughly a decade, Slaper ran Roy Denim as a complete one-person operation out of an Oakland workshop stocked with vintage industrial machines — machinist, pattern maker, line sewer, and graphic artist, all of it himself. The output was selvedge-denim jeans, shirts, and duck-canvas pants that drew an international following in the raw-denim world. "It's pretty much unheard of for someone to make their own jeans because it requires a lot of machines, industrial machines that you can't find easily," Kiya Babzani, owner of Self Edge and an early retail partner of Slaper's, told SFGate.

Slaper retired from denim production in 2021 and sold his equipment. At the time of his death he was working at Osha Thai, an Oakland eatery. David Shuck, managing editor of the denim trade publication Heddels, wrote in a tribute published July 14: "He had an insatiable curiosity that led him to master not only denim but other passions like running, drawing, train travel, or whatever other bug happened to grab him. He also possessed a kindness and sensitivity for the world that was a comfort to all who knew him."