In those jeans…

Andrew Brooks recalls the birth of denim and looks at the working class-to-classless history of jeans, in this short extract from Clothing Poverty

The birthplace and early heritage of denim jeans are disputed. France and Italy as well as the United States lay partial claims to their origins. Sailors from Genoa (from which the name ‘jeans’ is supposed to derive) were said to have spread hard-wearing Italian cotton fabric; the name ‘denim’ can be literally translated as de Nîmes, ‘of Nîmes’, the Roman city in the south of France famous for its textiles. Where there is consensus is that the history of modern blue jeans began with the weaving of denim fabric and the use of indigo dye, a natural colour easily fixed to cotton. Blue jeans material is made from weaving cotton threads: the diagonal weft thread passes under two or more dyed warp threads. The characteristic blue jean colour and diagonal pattern are produced on account of the warp threads being coloured blue and the weft left white, which makes for a strong twill fabric and also gives the inside of jeans their lighter colour.

In the 1870s Levi Strauss made the critical contribution of riveting the denim, which prevented tearing, and subsequently added five pockets and belt loops. These early models inspired the standard style, elements of which are seen in most contemporary designs. Levi Strauss’s developments were so influential because they brought together a range of different useful component parts: copper rivets provided long-lasting toughness; rugged twill fabric gave robust protection; the blue denim colour was simple to reproduce, first using indigo and later synthetic dyes; blue also proved a neutral colour popular among buyers; and finally the five-pocket design was functional and later augmented by various combinations of belt loops, buttons and zippers to aid fit.

The hard-wearing nature of jeans meant they soon became the trousers of choice for the American working man and were readily adopted by the iconic cowboy. Later, they provided part of the uniform of industrial workers during the Fordist phase of industrial development and mass manufacturing in the twentieth century.

In the 1950s and 1960s jeans began to emerge not just as utilitarian workwear, but also as a casual and subversive mode of dress for women as well as men. Screen icons like Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe adopted them as part of a costume which exuded characteristics such as youth, freedom and sex appeal. Hollywood colour films projected aspirational images of blue jeans, and young people in America as well as overseas imitated these dress styles.

However, jeans were not just passively taken up by other cultures imitating America; they have grown to have their own local meanings and significance. In the United Kingdom they were associated with transgressive and rebellious youth; in Eastern Europe they became politicized garments and behind the iron curtain were identified as nonconformist dress; whilst in Brazil the basic design has been adapted to reflect local cultural dynamics. In Japan jeans have a complex social history, which I discuss later in the book. Towards the end of the twentieth century jeans began to lose their subversive qualities in most of Europe and the Americas and became something closer to a default wardrobe item, no longer demarking a particular social group and instead offering anonymity via their ubiquity.

Jeans have moved from being an affectation of classlessness to losing any genuine correspondence to class. In terms of everyday ordinariness, wearing jeans has become a way to escape making a decision, and putting them on is an act of conformity. We have become conditioned to wear jeans as part of entrenched clothing systems of provision. Buying and wearing jeans means participating in the market; and they are relentlessly marketed at every price point from designer lines to bargain basement. The previously rebellious connotations of denim have been reappropriated as part of normal capitalist society. Jeans are the dress-down uniform of presidents and prime ministers as well as the street outfits of punks and protesters.

Although the USA is the largest market, with up to half a billion pairs sold each year, sales in Asia, particularly China, Japan and India, are also huge and expanding. Jeans have become a default item of clothing because they can be easily manufactured and meet both the practical and the cultural needs of modern lives.

The spheres of production and consumption influence one another as the market for, and the use value of, jeans ‘are shaped according to the modern relations of production and in turn intervene to modify those relations’. Use value means the material worth of a thing in relation to the wants and needs of humans. Therefore the ‘usefulness’ of jeans is not incidental, but governed the initial role they played in the agricultural and industrial development of America. Hard-wearing denim trousers were practical, reliable and very useful. This use value was later reinforced by the global production infrastructure, which developed to mass-manufacture a robust and affordable garment that could be tailored to convey different cultural messages. Jeans are a product of industrial development and in turn have shaped how industry developed, leading to the emergence of jeans systems of provision.

Denim has a life and lives with the wearer. If wearers stretch to climb over fences the fibres will be pulled as they extend their legs; if they work bent over fitting carpets or scrubbing floors the knees will thin out and split; if they sit cross-legged the denim will stretch across and pull around the thighs. These daily movements will exercise the twill fabric and leave the imprint of the rhythms of each wearer’s life. Old jeans can induce powerful feelings of warmth and reassurance.

Despite the lively nature of denim, the trousers themselves obviously do not have agency; any associations the owners might have are a result of the social relationships that the jeans embody, and this only has meaning in a given social context. When used jeans are transported somewhere new and taken up by a second owner they will form part of a new semiotic register, made up of a group of different signs and signifiers. This idea is important to understand in the context of the second-hand clothing trade and does not concern just our individual relationships with jeans, but also how they are perceived in a broader cultural context in a particular society. As anthropologist Daniel Millar has discussed, ‘the first core semiotic marker was the association of jeans with the United States. But this is now seen as merely historical. People do not wear jeans in London today to appear more American even if that association is essential to understanding how jeans first became ubiquitous.’ America played a vital role in establishing denim systems of provision, but now jeans are globally entrenched as the most common form of trousers on sale.

There is a world market which continues to operate semi-autonomously from processes in the United States. In parallel, at the level of individual garments, any perceived agency that a pair of jeans holds over a person will not exert that same effect when they are reworn by someone else. Just as their body will move in a different manner and stretch and work the threads in new ways, so will they also form new associations with the jeans, born of their own social interactions.