Jeans Origins

Primarily designed to be working pants, jeans took the world by storm. The durability and the resistance capabilities of denim, along with the flexibility and comfort of the material, made it the perfect worker’s pants. It’s also one of the few items of clothing that are pretty much unisex, as mens jeans are as popular as women’s jeans. Up until the 1950’s, only workers would wear jeans, and only while at work. As a funny note, at that time men’s jeans had the zipper in front while women’s jeans had it in the side, which I guess makes sense. Manufacturers stopped doing this mainly to cut on production costs. I still remember speaking with an old lady I met one day that said that she couldn’t bear wearing jeans because it only reminded her of work, there’s no way she would ever look at a pair of denim jeans and consider them leisure clothing.

But in the 1950’s it all changed. Youngsters began to regard jeans as fashionable clothing, and that’s pretty much all it takes. The sales of denim jeans sky rocketed as everyone started wearing them. The principal culprit of this trend is no other than the eternal James Dean. In the cinema classic “Rebel Without a Cause” he wore jeans and that was the corner stone in changing the mentality of youngsters about jeans.

Jeans became almost a symbol of American culture overseas. Nowadays they are pretty common all over the World, but in the 70’s and 80’s that was not so. Even in European countries like Spain and Portugal, that were under right wing dictatorships at the time, it was hard, if not impossible, to purchase a pair of jeans. Also, Coca-Cola was apparently forbidden. But the biggest and perhaps most popular case of denim starvation was in the former Soviet Union and countries behind the Iron Curtain. Jeans were almost currency behind the Iron Curtain, and foreigners who decided to part with their jeans were showered with gifts. Nowadays, jeans are still forbidden in North Korea.

But where to get jeans? The time that you could only buy jeans from Levy’s is over. Nowadays you can pretty much get them everywhere and all major clothing manufacturers make denim trousers. And they’re a lot cheaper too. Getting jeans from the online fashion store Very.co.uk will see you save a lot of money for quality jeans, for example.