A Brief History of Women in Jeans

Timeless elegance of white on
blue: Cindy Crawford

Many years ago, as evening was about to descend on a   grey-coloured city, I saw a girl in blue jeans and a crisp white shirt from a bus window. It was a small road, more like a lane in Calcutta’s crowded Burrabazar area overflowing with people (almost all working class male) and buses stuck in a nightmarish traffic snarl, so typical of Calcutta in those days. All buildings, shops, everything around were covered in soot and dust. There were small puddles in the road after a sharp pre-monsoon shower and of course, no sidewalk. In the midst of all that she walked in her blue jeans. Even then I did not really notice her features but the timeless elegance and romance of a girl in blue jeans – in this case, heightened by the unlikely surroundings of grimy working class Calcutta is still fresh in my memory.

Jeans: A Riveting Story

The word ‘denim’ came from de Nimes (that is from the French city of Nimes), where such twill fabric was originally produced. French weavers were actually trying to reproduce a sort of cotton corduroy much in vogue among the workers and soldiers of the Italian city of Genoa (Gênes in French, thus ‘jeans’).

Almost all such denim cloth was daubed in indigo, a plant-based dye from India (I have blogged about indigo here). This shows the British connection to blue denim.

Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis

As the story goes, the modern jeans or denim trouser with metal rivets was invented in California when a tailor Jacob Davis started making such trousers for miners. Soon, Davis in partnership with his cloth supplier Levi Strauss obtained a trade mark for their unique trouser on May 20, 1873. This was however known as ‘overalls’ till the 1960s, when baby boomers started calling them ‘jeans’.

Romance in Blue

Patent of Strauss and Davis expired in 1890s and by then blue denim overalls had become the uniform of the American working class. In the First World War, Lee Union-Alls jeans were the standard issue for all US military workers.

Gary Cooper: Denim by then became the favourite dress of Hollywood cowboys

In the 1920s and 1930s, handsome Hollywood cowboys like Gary Cooper started wearing blue denim trousers. This was the beginning of the romance with jeans. During the Second World War (1939-1945), American soldiers introduced their off-duty blue overalls to the World. This was how the global conquest of denim began.  But before we talk about the women in jeans, we need to rewind a bit.

Freedom Machines

Between 1880 and 1895, a women cycling craze swept through the western world. Riding bicycles did not only give them the freedom of movement but also ushered in a great change in women’s fashion. Women wearing trousers was something absolutely dreadful for most of the 19^th century in Europe and the USA. In fact, in many US cities it was a punishable offence.

Thanks to this bicycle craze, soon the Victorian fashion of long gowns/skirts were replaced by different types of leggings. For a while, conservative observers struggled to decide what was worse – women smoking or showing their ankles in public. Eventually this change paved the way for women wearing trousers in western societies.

Ginger Rogers in jeans

By the 1930s, some of the top Hollywood icons including Gingers Rogers wore denim pants, turning it into a fashion statement for women too.

Rebellious Jeans

James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause

Marlon Brando wore jeans on and off screen

Post-War, in the 1950s, denim trousers became the preferred leisure wear for the American youth. With stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean wearing jeans on and off the screen, denim trousers became a rage. In the 1960s, both the hippies as well as the youth protesting against the Vietnam War were invariably denim-clad. Now known as jeans, denim trousers emerged as the uniform of protest.

Madonna in ripped jeans

Ripped jeans also started life as part of this counter-culture trend sometime in the late 1970s- early 80s. Celebrities like Iggy Pop (who claimed to have pioneered this in 1978), Sex Pistols and then Madonna popularized ripped jeans.

Nothing comes between me and my Calvins: The most scandalous campaign of that time

By the end of the 1970s, jeans conquered the world of high fashion too. In 1976, Calvin Klein became the first top designer to put denim on the ramp. And in 1981, when a 15-year old Brooke Shields famously declared that nothing comes between her and Calvin Klein jeans, it came to the fashion centre stage.

Jeans as Fashion

Youngsters started sporting jeans in India from the late 1970s. Amitabh Bachchan was spotted wearing a denim in Sholay (1975). But teenagers in the 80s were mostly dependent on relatives bringing them a fashionable pair from abroad. Before we graduated to Levi’s, Lee or Wrangler, we all had Newport, Ruff & Tuff or Excalibur jeans (most of these brands were from Arvind Mills, which by the mid-1990s emerged as the largest denim manufacturer in the world).

Like in the West, by the 1990s in India also, Jeans emerged as a truly democratic fashion transcending social, economic and gender barriers. There were almost seasonal changes in Jeans trends in the West (check out here), but in India, we roughly remember the transition from classic fit to baggy trousers of the 1990s to low-waist of the 2000s and then back to a more fitted classic look. And of course, not to forget acid-washed or ripped varieties or the embroidered ones for girls.

For men, Khakis replaced jeans as the go-to leisure/casual trousers in the late 1990s. For Indian women, however, by then not only jeans were irreplaceable but also perhaps the most versatile trouser option. Jeans could be paired with white or simple tops for a casual chic looks or with kurti and bangles for an ethnic look or with boots and stylish tops/jackets, jeans could also hit high fashion notes.

Jeans as Freedom

In the 1920s, when a handful of progressive Indian women started cycling to Lucknow’s Isabella Thoburn College or on the streets of Lahore, it was a shock for the urban middle class India. Today even in the most socio-economically backward states of the country, there are popular government schemes to provide cycles to girls.

There is no better friend for most Indian women, especially students and working women, than a pair of hardy blue jeans to travel in crowded Indian public transport, braving water-logged streets in monsoon or numerous other roadblocks. Bans announced frequently by some village/khap panchayats or college principals on women wearing jeans are nothing but an expression of patriarchy, crude attempts to curtail their freedom.

Look beyond those (rightly) protesting on Twitter against a recent thoughtless remark by a politician; every time you see a girl coming out of tenements or rural areas to go to work in her denim trousers - like those ladies riding cycles to their freedom decades back - you know she wants to give wings to her dreams.