Jeans

Jeans have come a long way over the past 400 years. In the 1600's denim was the fabric of necessity. Today a pair of Raleigh Denim jeans will set you back almost $300.

Jeans back in the day from The History Blog...

The origins of denim are cloudy. Both Nîmes, France, and Genoa, Italy, claim to be its birthplace. The André family produced the sturdy cotton twill dyed indigo known as serge de Nîmes (hence denim) for generations, but Genoa claims to have produced jeans for sailors and fishermen since the 1500s and became known as Bleu de Genes (hence blue jeans).

One thing we know for sure is denim was a working class fabric. It was tough as hell and could be worn for years by people who rode them hard and, especially in the case of the Genoese sailors, put them away wet. Cowboys, railway workers, fishermen, beggars and lumberjacks didn’t often get their daily lives documented for the historical record, and while high-end textiles are sometimes carefully conserved over the centuries, jeans got worn until they fell apart.

That’s why the discovery of an anonymous Northern Italian painter who depicted poor people wearing denim in the mid to late 1600s is such a surprising find. “In people’s minds, jeans used to be all about Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, about the United States,” he said. “Nimes or Genoa? I don’t have the answer. But it’s amusing to think that jeans already existed in 1655.”

and now...



Before you run out to buy another pair of jeans you may want to think twice about the damage denim manufacturing does to the environment.