Denim Jeans

Denim is a strange fabric – not because of its characteristics as a fabric, but because of how it is perceived. In some ways it is ubiquitous. I would venture to say that most Americans own some clothing made of denim. But don’t try to wear denim to the local Country Club or private school, the last bastions of the dress code.

From Wikipedia…
“Denim (French town of Nîmes, from which 'denim' (de Nîmes) gets its name) is a rugged cotton twill textile, in which the weft passes under two (twi- "double") or more warp threads. This produces the familiar diagonal ribbing identifiable on the reverse of the fabric, which distinguishes denim from cotton duck. Denim has been in American usage since the late 18th century.[1] The word comes from the name of a sturdy fabric called serge, originally made in Nîmes, France, by the André family. Originally called serge de Nîmes, the name was soon shortened to denim.[2] Denim was traditionally colored blue with indigo dye to make blue "jeans", though "jean" then denoted a different, lighter cotton textile; the contemporary use of jean comes from the French word for Genoa, Italy (Gênes), where the first denim trousers were made.”

I am not sure how those institutions that ban denim define denim. Personally, I would hate to the enforcer of such dress rules. I would also not want to show up in anything that looked like denim, even if it did not meet the technical definition. And does denim have to be blue to set off the alarms? And even if it is blue, it might be fake denim made out of cotton and/or polyester.

Of course there is the whole question of what makes a pair of slacks “jeans” rather than just pants. Jeans used to be put together with rivets and have patch pockets. Now jeans are made out of all sorts of fabric, including cotton duck. In fact I have two pair of “jeans” that are black with black stitching, have patch pockets, but are of a softer fabric than denim. I bet they would “pass” if I were brave enough to wear them to a Country Club. Life is sure complicated.
When I was a kid, the little boys wore denim jeans to school (I went to public school). The boys’ jeans were conventional and blue, but the jeans were lined with flannel in bold plaids. The boys wore them with the pants rolled up so the flannel cuff would show.

Being a girl, I only wore jeans after school and on Saturdays. Most of my jeans were blue and made by Wrangler, but I especially loved my red jeans and my green jeans. They were bright, bold colors with white stitching. I remember waking up on a Saturday morning and jumping into my jeans so I could help my grandmother in the garden. And I guess, that says it all, I was WORKING in the garden.

Levi Strauss brought blue jeans to hard-working miners. Hence, jeans became associated with manual labor.

Suburbanites of the 1950s and 60s wore jeans, but mostly for work around the house. My father had a pair of jeans my mother bought him, and he wore them to clean the gutters and cut the grass. He would never have thought of going anywhere except perhaps the hardware store wearing them.

I can’t recall that my mother ever wore jeans. She made most of her own clothes and was known to be always fashionably dressed. She rarely wore slacks until the 1970s and 80s, but never jeans.
My grandparents, who lived with us, never wore denim or jeans. In fact, I don’t think my grandmother, who died in 1957, ever wore pair of pants of any kind. She wore a “house-dress” for working around the house or in her beloved garden. My grandfather, who died in 1961, always seemed to wear a suit, even after he retired.

While the teenage boys of the 1950s wore jeans and T-shirts, James Dean style, the teenage boys at my high school wore khaki and navy colored dress pants, oxford cloth shirts, dark socks and highly polished Weejun loafers. We girls wore plaid shirts, oxford cloth blouses with Peter Pan collars, and the same highly polished Weejun loafers as our male counterparts. Blue jeans may have banned, but it could just have easily been that the boys just shunned them for the “ivy league” look. For sure, girls were not allowed to wear slacks of any kind. I think, however, that some denim wrap around skirts may have made their way into the classroom without comment.
Being a co-ed at a state university in 1964 required adhering to a dress code. Blue jeans were strictly forbidden except within the quadrangle (a cluster of girls’ dormitories and a dining hall). In fact, slacks of any kind were prohibited in the classroom. Of course, we were partial to cut off blue jeans and delighted in wearing them off-campus. The problem was jeans were banned even downtown. Most of us kept a raincoat handy at all times for covering up our cut-offs. (Of course, our cut-offs were not cut in the sense of being hand-cut with scissors and raveling threads.) Our cut-offs were neatly hemmed and were the length of walking shorts. We loved going to the farm supply store, buying blue cotton workshirts and pairing them with our cut-offs.

The hippies were wearing jeans in the late 1960s, so those of us who were not hippies moved away from jeans. In our young married lives, jeans were reserved for the messiest jobs around the house. There is one picture of me in a sweat shirt and jeans covered in barley cereal while watching our son feed himself for the first time.

In the 1970s the jeans had bell bottoms and hip hugging waists. I mostly ignored the whole thing and didn’t buy any jeans again for another 20 years or so. I kept the ones I had, however, thinking that someday I would fit into them again. It never happened!

Back in 1992 I bought some jeans for sailing adventure in the Bahamas. For a few years I wore them for working around the house and for trips to Shenandoah Park and hiking in the woods. Then I outgrew them, but hope springs eternal and they stay in my closet.

In the mid-1990s I noticed that my more fashionable contemporaries were wearing jeans with blazers or even with fancy jackets. I tried unsuccessfully to fit into my jeans again, but never went so far as to buy any new ones.

In the 2000s I marveled at how the young girls and women managed to cram themselves into skin tight jeans worn below the waist. I figured they had to lie down to zip them! I was not prepared for that much contortion, and besides my figure does not do well with clothes that show every bulge.
A few years ago I found some jeans on sale in a size that fit me and I bought them. Turns out the NEW jeans fabric is stretchy. Ah, that explains a lot. My jeans are mostly black, but I have a couple of beige denim jeans as well. I am OK wearing the black ones for work-related meetings, but not sure I would try to pass the country club test.

Right now, aside from the two pair of jeans from the early 90s that have no stretch, I have two pair of real blue jeans. Both of them are stretchy with orange stitching and they actually fit. Still, I am a purist and I only wear them around the house, on weekends or hiking. I can never figure out what to wear with them. I have a jeans jacket, but it is a darker shade then my jeans so it sits in the closet. I have this orange jacket…that is only thing that really goes my jeans. I know these days you can wear jeans with almost anything, but I just can’t bring myself to be that free of convention. I am not sure what I will do when my orange jacket wears out – for sure, the jeans never will.

For our parents’ generation, denim jeans were the uniform of the working class. That must be the generation that wrote the rules banning them in country clubs, private schools, and a few classy restaurants.

For my generation, denim jeans bring back emotionally charged memories – but they are just pants. And as with any other pants, it would never occur to us to cut them with razor blades, scrub them with acid, etc. We are the children of the children of the depression and for us, deliberately making something look worn out is just plain strange. Unlike our parents, we are willing to wear jeans in public, but we are not about to deface them.

Now if I were going a ban a fabric, it would be "fat polyester." But that is another story.