style | feature Style Icons Part 5 Denim
What do high fashion, cowboys, James Dean and Woodstock have in common? Denim, that’s what.
Words by Amber Beard O
riginating from the French name ‘Serge de Nimes’, denim is known the world over for its durability, workability and for its transcendence of class. Research on the origins of jeans fabric show that it emerged in Genoa in Italy and in Nimes in France.
The original word for jeans may have indeed come from Genes; the French word for Genoa where sailors wore coarse cotton trousers. Weavers in Nimes tried to reproduce the jean fabric but instead developed a twill fabric in the Middle Ages which became known as denim; a direct translation from de Nimes meaning ‘from Nimes’. The fabric produced was used to make working over garments such as smocks and overalls and was considered to be of a higher quality than the ‘jean’ produced in Italy.
Jean was a crucial fabric for working class people in Northern Italy and evidence of this can be seen in a series of paintings made by an artist known as ‘The Master of the Blue Jeans’ from the 17th century which depicted scenes of impoverished lower class people wearing a fabric thought to be denim but which would have been the cheaper Genoese jean. But it was not just denim and jean fabrics which were used for working clothes, there was also dungaree. From a small village in the region of Bombay, Dongri, a cloth known in Hindi as ‘dungri’ was exported to England and made into cheap, robust working clothes. Over time the word dungri became dungaree. Indigo too, which was used for dyeing the cloth, came from indigo bush plantations in India until the late 19th century and blue denim takes its characteristic colour from inter weaving the blue and white threads.
But it was probably Levi Strauss who was responsible for bringing denim jeans into the wider world when he began a wholesale business in 1853 in California selling clothing to gold rush miners. At the same time Jacob Davis, a tailor, was buying bolts of cloth from Levis Strauss’ wholesale warehouse. Davis and Strauss experimented with different fabrics but found that denim was the most suitable fabric for work trousers. Davis had the idea to add copper rivets to the pockets to make them stronger and at the bottom of the button fly and in 1872 wrote to Strauss asking him to pay for the patent as he could not afford it. Strauss accepted the offer and in 1873 they received the patent for an ‘Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings’. The small red flag which is the iconic part of any pair of Levis was added in 1936.
Denim became popular with young people in the 1950s and moved away from its traditional role as work wear, instead becoming a symbol of teenage rebellion when James Dean appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One sporting jeans. There was also the cowboy film genre, popular from the thirties to the sixties and John Wayne became arguably the most famous denim wearing cowboy of all time. Fast forward again to the seventies and the culture and equally the counter culture that was Woodstock, anti- war hippies and punk and which made denim and jeans part of that anti -establishment movement.
In all its incarnations, denim and jeans have had an extraordinary longevity which transcends class, wealth and status. The runways of Dolce & Gabbana, Prada and John Galliano to name but a few, feature denim frequently and jeans can be found at the cheaper end of the range in Primark and pretty much every other chain store you can think of. Jeans and denim are practical, can be formal or informal, are comfortable and come in more shapes, sizes, colours and prices than anyone can imagine and will be here for many more years to come. As Yves Saint Laurent said somewhat wistfully, “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.”
‘I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes.’ - Yves Saint Laurent
September/October 2015 33
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