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Jeans date back to 1567 with the introduction of the word “genoese” or “genes” to describe the tough twill trousers worn by merchant sailors from the Italian coastal city of Genoa.
Denim dates back to the 17th century. Created in Nîmes, France, serge de Nîmes was a cotton twill cloth made of wool and silk. It later became known simply as “denim.”
Denim as we know it today originated in 1860, when Levi Strauss & Co., which was making work pants out of a stiff canvas fabric, added serge de Nîmes to its product line at the request of customers wanting a softer, less chafing fabric.
In 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patented their riveted work pant that kept the pocket and seams from bursting when doing heavy work. Denim was the staple of farm and industrial wear throughout the late 1800s and mid-1900s. It still retains the title of America’s favorite work pant today.
During the 1950s, young America discovered blue jeans and the industry exploded in the United States. Blue jeans went from being sold as solely a work and utility fabric to capturing the interests of the fashion-conscious public.
This fashion soon spread to other cultures and denim became more than just a piece of fabric, it grew into a social statement. Companies like Levi Strauss and H.D. Lee quickly responded when American and European teenagers embraced denim jeans as embodying the “Elvis” or “James Dean” look.
The basic denim jean gets its unique character from its yarn, indigo dyestuff, weaving and design, and washes and technical finishes.
Like other fabrics, denim can be dyed, washed down, chemically finished, or mechanically finished.
Chemical finishes can include the application of such substances as DP or durable press, softeners, stain repellents, water repellents, and others.
Mechanical finishing can include brushing, sanding, laser etching, color discharge, and many other novel effects.
These effects are made possible by the special character of denim yarns, the special character of indigo dyed yarns, specialized garment processing machinery, denim garment washing and finishing processes, denim garment overdyeing, and denim garment functional finishing.
The final look and feel of a denim garment depend in large part on its yarn. Yarn can range from soft to firm, even to uneven, weak to strong. The yarn’s twist direction and level of twist also impact the final effect of garment finishing as does the choice of ring or open-end spun yarn. In recent years, advances in the production of effect yarns, such as slub, accent, and stretch yarns have also played a part in developing new looks. With denim, yarn evenness is important. Even yarns provide a smooth surface that washes down or abrades to a uniform shade. Uneven yarns that vary in thickness result in great variations in shade. In fact with some abrasion finishing processes, thick areas can be abraded down to the white yarn core of the indigo dyes while the thin areas might be hardly abraded at all.
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Yarn twist has a similar impact on color and abrasion results. Low twist yarns are softer and tend to wash down or abrade more rapidly than higher twist yarns. Yarn twist also affects fabric hand, stiffness, strength, skew, cover, drape, appearance, and other characteristics. Another yarn characteristic that impacts finishing is size including the mixture of yarn sizes in a single fabric. Varying yarn sizes will affect finishing in a way similar to that of slub yarns. Slub yarns are yarns spun to have long and thick effects in them with subs in either the warp, filling, or both. Open-end and ring-spun yarns can both obtain slub effects.
Indigo dye is one of the most important factors affecting the look of denim. When indigo dyes are used, it gives the denim fabric a unique ability to fade in color after repeated laundering.
Indigo dye originated as a vegetable dye from the Indigofera tinctoria plant from India and Africa thousands of years ago. An indigo-dyed robe was found during an excavation in Egypt and is estimated to have been made around 2500 B.C.
In the Americas at the same time, a different type of indigo plant, Indigofera suffruticosa or Indigofera erecta, was used to make Natal indigo dyes. It was an important dye for the Mayan people who used it to paint their sacrifices prior to scarification as well as dyeing the royals clothing.
In the cooler climates of the world, like Europe, indigo was also produced from the Isatis tinctoria, or woad plant, and Polygonum tinctorium, also known as dyer’s knotweed.
In 1878, German chemist Adolf von Baeyer invented the first synthetic indigo dye. In fact, indigo was the first synthetic indigo dyestuff. By 1914, almost 95% of the natural indigo trade had disappeared. Today, synthetic indigo dyestuff accounts for essentially 100% of all denim products.
Indigofera tinctoria (true indigo)
During the 1980s, there was a designer jean craze with many styling variants. This phase ended in the 1990s when Levi Strauss & Company created the “Back to Basics” slogan. This began the revival of the ringspun denim but by the mid-90s, the designer jean craze had resurfaced with many companies producing their own brands. Now, advances in finishing techniques especially garment processes and fabric technology have created a high-tech denim jeans market.
Indigo dye yields a deep, bright shade of blue but with a low affinity for cotton, and as a result, it can be easily washed down in mill processing. Even the most state-of-the-art synthetic versions of indigo have an improved cotton affinity. Ring-dyed cotton is the key to many current denim garment finishes. Ring-dyed or white core cotton refers to yarn that is dyed with indigo in such a way as to keep the core of the yarn white. The white core is clearly visible. Without this ring-dyed effect, many of the most popular denim garment looks would not be possible but with proper cloth construction, dyeing, garment manufacturing, and finishing techniques, denim continues to take on fresh new looks.
The fascinating history of jeans and their French origins…
Jeans were invented in America in the mid-19th Century by a young man called Levi Strauss. Legend has it that in 1853, Levi Strauss, a 24-year-old German immigrant, left New York for San Francisco where the California gold rush was in full swing. He took with him a small supply of dry goods with the intention of opening a branch of his brother’s New York dry goods business. A prospector who came to the shop for supplies asked what was for sale. Strauss told him he had rough canvas to use for tents and wagon covers and the prospector said, “You should have brought pants!” saying he couldn’t find a pair of pants strong enough to last.
Levi Strauss was clearly a man who could take a hint. After much deliberation and experimentation, the cloth he eventually chose to make trousers to sell to the prospectors was a tough cotton fabric called “serge de Nimes”. It was produced in Nimes in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France.
It was dyed indigo blue because this was the cheapest dye in the market and the cloth was used to make tarpaulin. However, Levi Strauss found it was just perfect for trousers that were to be worn by men working in extreme conditions – strong, thick cotton which was very durable.
He called the trousers “jeans” – named after the blue dye that was used called “Genoa” and the cloth was called “denim” from shortening the fabric name “serge de Nimes”. The blue jeans were a hit with the prospectors and eventually manual workers across America.
In the 1960s celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean made the utility wear jeans a fashionable item when they wore them in films and jeans became mainstream wear and of course are now a part of the uniform of life.
Although jeans became the normal attire of American workers – they didn’t catch on back home in France until much later.
The blue cloth from Nimes was adapted for work wear in France in the late 19th Century and became the uniform of the manual working classes. The French workers wore “bleu de travail” (blues for work) in the form of jackets, overalls, trousers but not jeans, which were distinguishable by their use of copper rivets, orange stitching and were closer fitting.
Bleu de travail garments are still popular in France, particularly in rural areas and continue to be favoured by manual workers whilst jeans have become popular for office workers.
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