Uniform

For all the incarnations of jeans today, a few things define the enduring character of a classic denim pair: twill fabric, top-stitching, waistband, rivets, fly and belt loops. While simple, this formula has created one of the most enduring and ubiquitous clothing icons of the last 150 years.

First designed in the French town of Nîmes, jeans soon spread to America during the California gold rush, where they became the staple silhouette of workers–made to withstand mines and crude oil, the heavy ploughing of fields to construction sites and long laborious travel. Punctuating images of Depression-era America, denim’s rugged texture and utilitarian cut furnished the gritty conditions of the labouring ‘everyday’ man. This symbolism was revitalised in the 1950s as waves of counter-culture began brewing, from Marlon Brando to James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause–now a canonical image of 20th-century Americana–to then Bob Dylan, jeans began to take up new resonance as a vernacular for rebellion and individualism.

 Quickly, Levi Strauss & Co. started exporting jeans outside of America, taking their advertising of the all-American aesthetic of hard-working, honest labourers, dissenting cowboys and fiercely independent renegades to the rest of the world, making denim one of the most pervasive items in the global marketplace. In Japan, for example, denim is a world of its own. After jeans gained influence in the country in the 60s, they became emblems for outlaw youth enamoured with embodying what a pair of jeans had come to stand for: opposition to systemic conformity, a liberal looseness and an unrestricted horizon. 

Beyond comfort and durability, the power of a pair of denim jeans lies in its dual identity: that of the honest worker and the autonomous rebel. Each makes up an aura of authenticity, of being ‘real’. In many ways, denim is an ‘anti-fashion’ staple–no frills or pomp but refreshingly nonchalant and uncontrived. Always marketed and perceived as more than simply a commodity of dress, we’re told that a pair of denim jeans stays with us over time, slouching to fit the curves of the individual body: no one pair remains the same; it frills, stretches and frays, memorialising a personal history of the wearer, becoming their wholly unique stamp. 

We buy jeans because they symbolise our self-possession, critical acumen and cultural disavowal. They’re our sartorial equivalent of ‘touching grass’–a remedy to our collective identity crisis and disillusionment with the inane aesthetic of our commercial environments. We wear them to feel like ourselves again in a world where we are increasingly defined by what we wear than who we are. Our pair of denim jeans exteriorises an announcement of autonomous selves, so we might locate our bodies in a counter-cultural space of authenticity, no matter how ironic, futile or unreal that may be. As Umberto Eco wrote in Lumbar Thoughts: “With my new jeans, my life was entirely exterior: I thought about the relationship between me and my pants and the relationship between my pants and me and the society we lived in. I had achieved heteroconsciousness, that is to say, an epidermic self-awareness.”