Fascinating History of Blue Jeans

September 11, 2009

Interview with James Sullivan author of Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon

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Mike Carruthers:
Do you know why denim pants are called jeans?

The word jeans comes from Genoa, Italy which was a major shipping port in the middle ages and the French called the Genoans, "The Gene." And one of the things that they made in Genoa was sort of a precursor to denim material, which is known as jean cloth. 

James Sullivan, author of the book Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon says the most money ever paid for a pair of jeans was $46, 532 paid by Levi Strauss for a pair of miner's jeans from the 1880's, and it's interesting how old jeans are often found.

The jeans will be found in the mines of Nevada and the West. They were used in a lot of cases when they started to wear out - they would be used to fill cracks, to keep the mines intact. And excavators have found fairly good examples of old jeans socked away in the cracks of old mines.

And James says John Wayne was one of the first people to stone-wash blue jeans to make them soft and more comfortable.

Every time he was going to go on a new film set, he would take his family on a vacation beforehand and he would have his new pair of jeans that he was going to wear on the film set. And his family, in a sort of a ritual, would bundle the jeans up with rocks, tie them up and toss them off a pier in the Pacific Ocean and leave them for a couple of days until the vacation was over with. And then when he dragged them out, they had been broken down and softened by the combination of the stone and the water.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.