159 Jeans saga

Jeans Saga

It all started when I bought a nice pair of jeans at a thrift store. The jeans retained the original sales tag, so they had never been worn. The tag said $124; I bought them for $2.50. They are nice, but not THAT nice. You might be able to tell that they are not wrinkle-free!

When did jeans become so expensive and sport designer-labels?

I remember my mother telling me that my sister and I could not wear "dungarees" except for camping trips and the like. I think she felt they were for the laboring classes, not nice middle-class girls. 

When I searched for images of dungarees, the most common images were of bib overalls, but I know dungarees were often pants without the bib. Incidentally, dungarees have been around since the 17th century and the cloth came from a village near Bombay, India, Dongri. The Hindu name of the cloth, which was often blue, was dungri.

Genovese sailors were known
 for their blue jeans

Denin was also known in the 17th century. The cloth was made in southern France in Nîmes--it was known as de Nîmes, meaning "from Nîmes". The de Nîmes fabric was made into pants in Genoa, Italy. When French soldiers entered the town in 1800, a merchant sold them blue pants from Genoa or "bleu de Genes." Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis, of San Francisco, are much better known for their contribution--the mass production of work pants with rivets that reinforced the pockets and the fly of the jeans. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for this brief history.)

My mother probably associated dungarees and jeans with the Beatnik movement of the 1950s.  Or bad boys such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

By the time of the hippies, I think she gave up! These movements did a lot to popularize the blue jean. Remember tie-dying your jeans? Mine never looked that good!

Sometime after, Army-Navy surplus stories, Sears & Roebuck, Montgomery Wards and the similar stores were no longer the only source for jeans. In the 1960s $200 jeans started to appear along with acid-washed denim. Now jeans, both new and vintage, can go for thousands. 

And, the diversification in blue jeans matches many other consumer goods in our current society. I believe, however, that there are more jeans styles than Oreo flavors (That was a different blog!). As with many other products that have gotten too complicated for me to want to figure out, I stick to one product--Gloria Vanderbilt's Amanda jeans. She designed them in the 1970s to be jeans that fit and they do!

And I can find her jeans in thrift shops too!

Now for another blog: when are you too old to wear blue jeans? There is some survey that says 53. What!?

Savvily clad?--Trish