Rare is the person without an item of denim in their wardrobe. Whether that’s a Primark jacket, some well-loved Levi’s or a pair of £1,550 Balenciaga jeans will depend on your age, taste and income.
Whoever you are, you’re one of the estimated 80 per cent of the population who’s owned a piece of denim clothing, contributing to its supremacy as arguably the most popular fabric in the world for the last 80 years, with the global market projected to be worth $95 billion by 2030.
Of far more interest than denim’s statistics, however, is its story. For anyone after a deeper knowledge of their favourite fabric than the one afforded by the glib description provided by their online retailer of choice (‘wide leg/high rise/turn-up cuffs’), a new book, Denim: The Fabric That Built America, will act as a tall, cool glass of water.
Authors Graham Marsh and Tony Nourmand were inspired by a 1935 project commissioned by President Roosevelt’s government, in which a group of photographers travelled across the United States documenting the country’s poverty, and the government’s relief efforts – a nine-year undertaking ending in 1944.
The resulting archive of more than 170,000 images ranges from the well-known to the rarely seen. Marsh and Nourmand sought to look at them through a fashion lens, and so set about the Herculean task of leafing through every image.
“I like denim, but I’m not a denim head,” says Nourmand, who discovered that 3,000 of the images featured people wearing denim. “There were photographs of people working on farms, working in factories, working for the US Army, wearing brands like Levi’s, Carhartt, Wrangler and Lee – all brands that people wear today. But this was well before the 1950s, when teenagers started picking up on denim as a means of rebellion.”
To arrive at the final edit took three solid days and nights. “I became obsessed,” says Nourmand. “The biggest challenge I faced was that the collection isn’t keyworded. You can’t type in “denim” and return a search result. It took five months from start to finish to do the book, but I think for most people, it would have taken two years.”
Do they have a favourite image? “There are so many favourites, but I love the photograph of the WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] aircraft mechanics working on a North American training plane,”says Marsh. “I also like the character on the cover, Russ Nicholson.”
“He’s wearing Carhartt, a brand that young people still wear today,’ adds Nourmand. ‘It was taken in 1935, but it feels timeless.”
To anyone reared on a more modern diet of slick, sexy Calvin Klein ads featuring Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg in jeans, the fact that these images all hail from an era before denim became fashionable is a refreshing reset. They’re a window into a completely different world, and a time when denim was purely functional, rather than touched by the hand of fashion.
“It’s a deep dive into denim past – images we don’t see any more that speak of denim’s true origins as workwear,’ says Marsh. ‘It was important to tell this story as a visual history, through archive images of serious, authentic denim workwear worn with determination and grace by the people that lived and worked through this decade.”
They depict miners, cowboys and factory workers; manual labourers who needed a tough, durable fabric that rose to the challenge of the back-breaking work they did.
Which is really why denim was invented. While its origins are debated, most concur that it was first made in Nimes, France, in the late 17th century, as a result of weavers trying to replicate a hard-wearing fabric called ‘jeane’.
The weave they used gave it a blue front and a white underside; the name ‘denim’ comes from ‘de Nimes’. Jeans themselves date back to the 16th century, when ‘genoese’ or ‘genes’ was used to describe the tough twill trousers worn by merchant sailors on the Italian coast of Genoa.
The irony that this most durable, sustainable of fabrics is, at times, treated as being as disposable as paper these days isn’t lost. While we all have our favourite pair, most of us would confess to replacing, or at least replenishing, our jeans collection far more regularly than their longevity need dictate.
Boot-cut or boyfriend, low-waist or high, dark-wash or bleached, we all love to ring the changes, consoling ourselves that the cost per wear will still be far lower than that of any other new purchase. Which is absolutely true. Jeans go with anything – and, in today’s casual culture, can be worn almost anywhere.
Marsh, who is a ‘denim head’, isn’t a fan of fashion’s more faddish takes. “It amazes me how much people are prepared to spend on designer denim,” he says. “They’re jeans that have no heritage or back story. Some of the extremely expensive ones are embellished with diamonds and other precious stones and sell for more than $1 million. To me this is obscene – it’s like wearing your bank balance on your backside. When it comes to designer jeans, I’m proud to be a denim snob and stick to a tried and tested heritage brand.”
His favourite? “Several pairs of Levi’s – XX501s and a couple of pairs of 505s, [a style] which was introduced in 1967.”
He and every other denim head will be heartened to know that Levi’s 501s were voted the most iconic fashion item of all time in a recent survey by shopping platform Whatnot, winning 45 per cent of the vote. Worn by everyone from John Wayne to Marilyn Monroe, and more recently by fans including Selena Gomez and Sydney Sweeney, the classic style, which celebrated its 150th birthday last year, has surged in popularity in recent times.
Partly, this can be attributed to the surge in second-hand and vintage shopping. But mainly, it’s because the 501 is such a classic, failsafe style with the rare ability to flatter almost everyone. Whatever the vagaries of fashion, as this new book reiterates, some design classics can never be improved upon.
