Herringbone (1930): Basic blue jeans consist of twelve pieces of denim (four legs, two patch pockets, one fly front, and five belt loops), two front pocket linings, one zipper, two pocket rivets, one button, and hundreds of metres of thread. Denim is a cotton twill fabric, in which an undyed weft thread is woven under two blue-dyed, vertical warp threads, creating subtle colour variations. To find out why jeans are blue, visit walrusmagazine.com/more.
Levi’s Women’s (1970): In the sixteenth century, Genoese sailors — Genes — swabbed the decks in cotton twill pants. Cheap and durable, denim became the uniform of labourers in the nineteenth century. Natural indigo rubbed off onto the sweaty necks of American workers, producing “blue collars.” By the modern era, artists searching for authenticity were co-opting the working-class attire. William S. Burroughs suspected Kerouac’s On the Road was “responsible for selling a million pairs of jeans” to beatnik wannabes. Yves Saint Laurent, who famously said he regretted not having invented blue jeans, sent a denim topcoat and boots down his Paris runway in 1969.Today hipsters dry-age their jeans to achieve an authentic look, not washing them for up to eight months.
Levi’s Acid Wash (1970): When button-fly pants gained popularity in the 1830s, Mormon preacher Brigham Young denounced them as “fornication pants.” Contemporary denim fetish websites have broadened the field, featuring galleries of tight, wet, low-rise, and cut-off jeans, as well as “camel toes.” In the ’70s and ’80s, denim-clad crotches graced many an album cover, despite the persistent if erroneous belief that tight pants reduce sperm count. According to a 2003 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, however, low-rise jeans can contribute to meralgia paresthetica (a compression of the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve). “Now that hip-huggers are back in fashion,” the authors wrote, “physicians can expect to see more patients with tingly thighs.”
Versace (1990): Globally, more than one billion pairs of jeans are sold annually, netting upwards of $15.8 billion (all figures US) — just shy of Chad’s GDP. Back in the 1880s, around $1.25 ($27, adjusted for inflation) would buy a new pair of Levi’s 501 jeans; a pair from that era was purchased for the company’s archives in 1997 for $25,000. Today’s humble 501s max out at $98, a paltry sum compared to apo Jeans’ diamond button and rivet jeans, which start at $4,000 and come with an appraisal sheet from a top jeweller in New York’s diamond district.
Seven (2000): Jacob Davis, a tailor for labourers in Reno, wrote to San Francisco merchant Levi Strauss in 1872, asking him to partner up on an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings.” After obtaining the patent the following year, Levi Strauss & Co. began cranking out copper-riveted “waist overalls.” Workers’ pockets no longer ripped at the seams, but the back pocket rivets scratched their saddles, and the crotch rivet became hazardous in proximity to campfires.
Carhartt Coverall (1950): Until a German chemist synthesized indigo in 1870, the colour in denim (and all other blue textiles) relied on the leaves of small shrubs predominantly from the genus Indigofera. Traditionally, cotton threads were immersed in a mixture of fermented foliage kept at blood temperature; when they were removed, the dye oxidized and turned the threads blue. Thriving cotton and indigo plantations were cultivated in India under the British Raj, and before that in the southern United States, where African field slaves developed the call-and-response precursor to “blues” music.
Quilted Overalls (1960):
Shawty had them Apple Bottoms jeans (jeans)
Boots with the fur (with the fur)
The whole club lookin’ at her
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low low low low low low low low.
“Low,” Flo Rida, featuring T-Pain, 2007
Jordache (1980): In February 1999, Italy’s Corte Suprema di Cassazione overturned the rape conviction of a driving instructor after concluding that his romp with an eighteen - year -old student must have been consensual because the girl was wearing jeans at the time. “It is impossible to take off jeans . . . without the active cooperation of the person wearing them,” the judges reasoned. In protest, women in the Italian parliament started wearing jeans to work. Legislators in Los Angeles followed suit, designating April 25 Denim Day in LA to raise awareness about sexual assault.
Le Chateau (1990): Environmentalists have raised concerns about chemicals used in the production of synthetic dyes, cotton, and galvanized buttons. Moreover, a 2006 French study found that a year of machine washing, tumble drying, and ironing a pair of blue jeans twice a week uses 138 kilowatt hours of energy — as much as the per capita electricity consumption of Papua New Guinea in 1995. But jeans can be green, too. UltraTouch insulation uses denim offcuts collected from factories to make batts of toxin-free home insulation. And for a period of fifty years, until the turn of the millennium, each piece of paper money printed in America contained 20 to 30 percent recycled cotton from denim scraps.
Imitation of Christ (2006): Levi Strauss & Co. called a 1918 version of its overalls “freedomalls.” To wit, when off-duty American GIs wore jeans in the streets of Europe during World War II the pants became a powerful symbol of the American dream. Behind the Iron Curtain, in late-’70s Hungary, a pair of American jeans could sell for 140 percent of the average worker’s income. “There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than the entire Red Army,” mused French philosopher Régis Debray, five years before the Soviet Union collapsed. In Chinese, jeans translates as niuzaiku (“cowboy pants”).
Evisu (2008): Laurie Beth Jones’s 1997 book, Jesus in Blue Jeans, offers “a practical guide to everyday spirituality” (lagging twenty or so years behind the American Bible Society’s denim-covered pocket edition of the Good News Bible). Meanwhile, a small Ohio-based company called Jewish Jeans uses its profits to fund Jewish causes. Rounding out the Semitic triumvirate, Al Quds jeans, manufactured in Italy and Pakistan, feature a high waist and baggy legs that won’t impede repeated kneeling; large pockets to hold taboo objects while praying (and prayer beads when not); and discrete green seams.
