I’ll
confess, I have nine pair of jeans ranging from designer blue denims I found on
sale (no way I’d pay $250 for them!) to black biker jeans that have seen better
days. Jeans go everywhere in Texas, but according to a piece from the BBC, all
the world wears jeans.
Jeans were
banned as unsuitable school attire when I was in high school. When I look back,
they weren’t even popular outside of school. Then I went to college. There
jeans--Levis and Wranglers mostly--became a uniform of sorts for a certain
cross-section of the collegiate population. “Designer jeans” was still an
oxymoron, not the zillion dollar commodity of today, and the concept of
broken-in, pre-distressed clothing conjured images of Goodwill or Salvation
Army stores.
As I’ve
traveled over the past few decades, I’ve noticed a radical change in attitude
toward jeans in Europe. There was a time when I wouldn’t have dreamed of
wearing them on the streets of Paris or London because the locals would have
instantly pegged me as an American tourist. Now? I rarely pack anything else
and fit right in regardless of the locale. Attire that once denoted a laborer
or cowboy has seeped into every culture and every social strata, uniting us
under a denim flag. The BBC piece backs up my observations:
[Jeans] is a subject that is relatively
unstudied, says anthropologist Danny Miller, whose book Blue Jeans will be
published next month.
In every country he has visited - from the
Philippines to Turkey, India and Brazil - Miller has stopped and counted the
first 100 people to walk by, and in each he found that almost half the
population wore jeans on any given day. Jeans are everywhere, he says, with the
exception of rural tracts of China and South Asia.
Okay, maybe
Bhutan and Burma still have a way to go, but the rest of the world seems to be
onboard. Really, how cool is that?
When I was
20, a prediction that my mother and father would one day wear jeans would have
made me collapse in hysterical laughter or shudder in horror. And yet, the old
folks don the denim these days along with the rest of us. That may not be
progress—honestly, are jeans still jeans when they have elastic waistbands—but
it is change. And let’s be grateful to the fashion gods that lycra stretch
pants never caught on the way jeans did!
Fess up. How
do you feel about jeans—love ‘em, hate ‘em, haven’t worn a pair since 1995?
