HELLO!!

This is my first entry on tellmeboutjeans.wordpress.com

WHY IM DOING THIS

I was assigned to do an individual assignment on the history of any topic that interests me. After pondering for a week, I narrowed down my choices to fashion as I have a greater interest in this than historical events or history of other topics. Initially, my plan was to explore the history of Victorian clothes and their influence of the fashion industry over the years. However, I realised that there were limited sources available for this topic. Thus, I finally decided on history and development of denim jeans from 18th to 20th century along with economical revolutions.

Due to the rapid proliferation of the world wide web (aka internet), I chose to do up a blog about history of jeans  instead of a report. This is partly because I can easily add pictures I find from the internet onto my blog  and also because I think that it is a  more interesting medium to engage the reader. Additionally, i can pass on this blog address to my friends so that they can also learn more about the history of jeans too! Furthermore, this blog can be updated in the future as history is always in the making and does not just end with a report. It can also be assessed by everyone who has the interest enough to google about this topic, thus making it beneficial for not just me ( who is trying to get good grades for my elective) but also everyone who wants to know more about the history of jeans!

Hope you will enjoy your stay here at my blog and learn more about the history of jeans.

Wear your Levis out today!!!

Books that i referenced to are:

The 20th century fashion: The 60s Mods and Hippies by Kitty Power-Temperley

Blue Jeans by Hamlyn, 20th Century Style

Websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_rush

http://www.youtube.com/

The Birth of the Blues

The origin of the word “jeans” goes all the way back more than four hundred years to 1567, the earliest record of its use being as “Genoese” or “Genes”, the French spelling for the Italian port of Genoa, where the merchant sailors wore sturdy work pants.

Serge de Nimes, the fabric named after the French city of Nimes from where it originated, became known as “denim”.

A German chemist, Adolf von Baeyer, developed the first synthetic indigo dye in 1878, and soon after blue jeans was born.

Either way, the history of jeans goes this far back in history!!

The 18^th Century

At first, jean cloth was made from a mixture of things. However, in the eighteenth century as trade, slave labour, and cotton plantations increased, jean cloth was made completely from cotton. Workers wore it because the material was very strong and does not wear out easily. It was usually dyed with indigo, which was previously mentioned in the previous entry, a dye taken from plants in the Americas and India, which made jean cloth a dark blue colour.

Through the 19^th century, the population of the United States rocketed in their population size to over 60 million, and for most of those immigrants it represented a land of hope and opportunities were dreams of a better life will come true.

This promise came true in the California Gold Rush of 1849, and the “49ers”- the gold prospectors wanted clothes that were strong and inexpensive to help them realize these dreams.  Gold rush will be further elaborated below.

In 1853, Leob Strauss started a wholesale business, supplying clothes, leading to the founding Levi Strauss an Co. Strauss later changed his name from Leob to Levi. It manufactured Waist High Overalls and “pantaloons” for the new mining community, using duck and sail cloth they had originally intended for the use on tents and covered wagons. This ensured the durability of the work wear manufactured.  In 1873, Levis Strauss and Co. and Jacob Davis jointly patented the latter’s invention of metal rivets being utilised to reinforce the stress points in the overalls. After a publicity stunt which involved two horses trying unsuccessfully to pull apart a pari of jeans, LS&Co introduced their leather patch with the two-horse symbol in 1886. 

Gold Rush

A gold rush is a period of feverish migration of workers into the area of a dramatic discovery of commercial quantities of gold. Gold rushes were typically marked by a general buoyant feeling of a “free for all” in income mobility, in which any single individual might become abundantly wealthy almost instantly.

These early gold-seekers, called “forty-niners,” traveled to California by sailing boat and in covered wagons across the continent, often facing substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly-arrived were Americans, the Gold Rush attracted tens of thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia and Asia. At first, the prospectors retrieved the gold from streams and riverbeds using simple techniques, such as panning.

The effects of the Gold Rush were substantial. San Francisco grew from a small settlement to a boomtown, and roads, churches, schools and other towns were built throughout California. A system of laws and a government were created, leading to the admission of California as a state in 1850.

1930s

It was the cowboys in the West who often wore jeans in the movies leading to the increase in popularity of jeans in the 1930s. Although the industrial application of early jeans – in the case of Levi’s targeted segment of the gold mining community- was a major selling point, right from the start they also drew on associations with the Wild West in their advertising.

As men were mere legends, the horse-handlers on Levis’s label were a lasting reminder of the blue jeans’ connotation with the open spaces and land. From the Dustbowl dramas of the Depression to the modern myth of Marlboro Country, the lone individual silhouetted against the big sky of the prairies, as the personification of a vanishing America, was usually denim-clad.  

1950s

Jeans were mainly worn by the workers in the early 19^th Century attributing to the industrial revolution and war. However, moving on to the 1950’s, jeans became fashionable within the earlier generations (teenagers) and was the first truly unisex item in the mass fashion market.

Juvenile delinquency was a very fashionable trend during the 1950s, among those who preached against it as well as those who practiced it. Jeans were the symbol of the teenage rebel in TV shows and movies. There were pulp novels devoted to it, teen movies celebrating it (often with the marvelous Mamie Van Doren, seen in Untamed Youth) and newspaper crusades against it. And all these miscreant youth, it seemed, wore jeans.

Once girls were wearing trousers, there was no limit to the lengths they would go to get their way. The Violent Years and Blue Denim were typical teen-epics appealing to youthful cinema goers

James Dean was the most enduring teen icon of all and blue jeans were an essential part of the movies he starred in. Rebel Without a Cause was one of his more popular shows in the 1950s where he was almost perpetually in jeans!

1960-70′s: Hippies

 Style development of jeans

Different styles of jeans were made, to match the 60′s fashions: embroidered jeans, painted jeans, psychedelic jeans…

The extra denim on flares encouraged customizing on a hitherto to unprecedented scale. Patches, fringes, badges and other additions to the classic texture of serge de Nime were given a whole new area of influence below the knee, on pants that made other Seventies phenomenon such as platform shoes, visually redundant.

Flared jeans and their even more exaggerated relations bell-bottoms also enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1970s. They were often spotted on pop stars and fashion models as wells as the more often lampooned footballers and television celebrities.

The hippies

The hippy movement was not as much about having long hair and being unkempt, as it was about the attitude, and not trusting the government. During the Vietnam War, when mostly poor American men were being drafted and sent to fight a war, based on a lie. At the time, many of them were coming home in boxes. Being a hippy meant questioning authority, and its power. It was about peace, and not wanting to hurt others. The long hair was out of rebellion. It was used to send a statement that you won’t be told how to look, or live. Besides the peace movement, being a hippie was also about rejecting middle-class materialism and capitalism in favor of a more spiritual, more environmentally conscious approach. Sometimes hippies signaled that rejection of America’s money-grubbing ways by not bathing for weeks on end, or using illegal drugs, especially marijuana.

Whether in rural hippy communes, urban squats or the nomadic latte-day gypsy camps of the New Age travelers, the voluntarily displaced, dispossessed and usually disgruntled are usually to be found in a rag tag array of definitely non-designer denim.

“Acres and acres of blue denim” was how more than one paper described the great rock festivals of the late sixties and early Seventies, when a whole generation flocked to Monterey, Woodstock and the isle of Wight to get it on with nature, music and each other. Thus, it seems more than often that when people think of the fashion in the 1970s together with the hippies’ movement, they would relate it to jeans.

 Throughout the Eighties and Nineties almost everyone in the world of high fashion, from Jean-Paul Gautier to Vivienne Westwood and Paul Smith to Katharine Hamnett, seem to plunder the pioneers for inspiration, but in the case of blue jeans classic is definitely not couture, and in a move back to basics the design of the original is now worn and recognized as both the essential and the best.  

1990s: Recession

Although denim never goes completely out of style, it does go out of fashion from time to time. In the 1990s, youths are not particularly interested in Levis and other tradition jeans styles as it is mainly because of their parents: the “generation born in blue” was still busy trying to squeeze in their once fashionable jeans. As almost none of the teenagers would rather be dead than to be caught in their parent’s clothes, the rebellious youth turned to other forms of pants such as khakis, combat and other branded sportswear pants. Even if they wore denim, it has to be in different cuts, finishes, shapes and styles or in the form of aged, authentic, vintage jeans, discovered in markets, secondhand and thrift stores rather than conventional jeans stores. It was also then that Levis Strauss & Co , the number one producer of jeans and the “ single most potent symbol of American style on planet earth  fell victim to the recession and had to close down 11 North American factories.

khaki pants

Do you still remember those days were people will rush to Giodarno in Singapore to get their favourite pair of khaki cargo pants? 

That was in the 1990s!! 

2000: Reinventing Denim

 Products in the fashion world need to be reinvented from time to time and jeans has been back on designers catwalks, at Chanel, Dior, Chloe and Versace. The single most potent symbol of fashion, summer ’99 Tom Ford’s feathered, beaded, beat-up, torn-knee Gucci blue jeans,  seen globally, sell out instantaneously at $3715 a pop. Freed of all social and creative restrictions, denim is assuming any number of disguises and contexts to be worn in and has broken through almost any limitation on price. It can also be found in home collections, appearing in cushions, bed spreads and furniture-coverings.