American Experience (1988–…): Season 34, Episode 4 - The United States in the Twentieth Century: Part 1 1900-1933 - full transcript
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You don't
really stop and think about why
half of the population
of the planet is wearing them
on any given day.
We just are.
Have you ever asked yourself
why everyone you know
owns multiple pairs of jeans?
Dress it up, dress it down...
People
know that when they wear them
they look cool.
This one garment can be both
universal and individual at the same time.
There is nothing like that
in the history of clothing.
And, in fact,
Yves Saint Laurent said he wished
he had invented jeans,
that he thought they were
the most important item of
fashion in the 20th century.
They wore them in the mines,
on the cattle trails.
My own father wore them toppling
200-foot Douglas firs.
Jeans are the quintessential
American garment.
120 years later, gentlemen,
blue jeans are still basically
the same pair of pants
that came out of the California Gold Rush.
But so much
of the story we tell about jeans
is a myth.
The
strongest pants the West has ever seen.
It is about
the cowboys, and the West,
it's about Levi Strauss,
and the Gold Rush.
It's always the same story...
After the
cowboys, jeans got picked up
by rockers and bikers and hippies
and now everybody wears them.
But denim has been around
much, much longer.
It has a long and deep history
with so many other fascinating stories
that are not always told.
In 1850, Levi
Strauss invented the toughest pants
the West had ever known:
Levi's blue jeans.
Blue jeans do
represent American culture
to the rest of the world,
but like any other good
product of America,
you know, we, we borrow all the best ideas
from, from everywhere.
The real fact of the matter is
that blue jeans themselves
originated somewhere else.
The story of denim jeans
is so much more than Wrangler,
it's more than Levi Strauss,
especially when it comes to the material.
We're not quite sure
exactly where the fabric originated,
but there are several hints.
One is Dungri, India, where as
early as the 17th century,
they were creating
a coarse cloth for workers,
eventually called dungaree.
There's the Genoans of Italy,
who had a type of sail cloth
that was fashioned into work pants.
And there's Nimes, France,
where the cloth there was known
as "serge de Nimes."
Not always, but very often,
these various types of cloth
were dyed blue,
probably to hide dirt as much as anything.
So, we have blue "jean" from Genoa,
we have blue "de Nimes" or denim
coming from Nimes,
but when we make it into pants in America,
we end up morphing the garment
into blue jeans.
People don't necessarily
think about how their blue jeans
came to be blue.
Historically, that's because of
the indigo dye.
Centuries ago, indigo was said
to be worth its weight in gold.
Competition for it was so fierce
Europeans actually called it
the "devil's dye."
Indigo is in fact a weed.
The process of turning indigo
from this small green leaf
into a dye is a very delicate process;
so only the most skilled
are able to do this.
One of the neatest
things about dying with indigo
is the dye vat is green;
it's not blue.
And when you introduce a fabric
like denim to the dye vat,
it comes out green.
And then, as it oxidizes in
our atmosphere, it turns blue.
It is magic.
Indigo dyeing is magic.
In many cultures,
indigo cloth has a spiritual importance.
In Africa, the cloth
is considered the next layer
to the skin.
It holds the person's soul, their spirit.
Africans have had a long history
of working indigo and knew
the special process involved
in making the dye
and in dyeing cloth.
And of course many
African captives who became enslaved
in the new world brought with
them knowledge of how
to extract the blue from the plant,
and how to fix the blue to fabrics.
Indigo is one of the ways
in which slave-holding
became tied to the economic fortunes
of the colonial experiment
in the Americas.
So in the
mid-1700s, there was this labor
that had been extracted from Africa,
and indigo presents itself as this thing
with economic possibility.
And then when you add to it
moving the dye stuff from one
end of the world to the other,
it only increased in value.
And Eliza Lucas benefited enormously
from the impact of this trade.
Eliza Lucas has
been credited as literally producing
indigo in America.
She's been credited as a botanist.
She's even written about
in elementary school
and high school textbooks.
Eliza Lucas was the
daughter of a colonial governor.
She had studied botany,
and when Eliza was a teenager,
her father bought her,
among many other plants, indigo.
The gift
came from perhaps Antigua.
The South needed something
to add to crop rotation, and tobacco
was something cultivated here.
Rice was cultivated here.
Adding indigo into your crop rotation
was a way to find additional profit.
Once Eliza gets
her hands on the indigo seeds,
it takes off in terms of production.
Indigo was a second cash crop
behind rice in South Carolina.
And on the eve of the American Revolution,
more than a million pounds of indigo
was being shipped overseas.
Eliza Lucas was probably one of
the most well-known producers
of indigo in colonial America.
But Eliza's hands weren't blue.
She didn't get her hands dirty
with the indigo crop.
The knowledge to grow indigo
came from enslaved people.
They're the ones that did
the work that allowed her
to become this great planter
that she's been credited for.
Indigo really encapsulates
this problem of how do we begin
to tell the story
of captive people and how we document
their contributions in America,
and to the denim history in particular.
We know the names
of all the enslaved people that were owned
by the Lucas and Pinckney family.
"Isaac, Pompey,
Molly, and their child, Nanny...
Mary and her children,
Prince and Be..."
These are generations of families.
We're not just talking about
a husband and a wife,
or a mom and a dad.
We see grandparents on this list.
"Nanny and her children. Juno..."
They're the ones
that came from communities that dyed
all kinds of cloth in beautiful colors.
They're the ones that had
the knowledge of indigo
and created generations
of wealth for these
white slave-holding families.
Back in the 19th century,
denim really dominated,
because it's a strong weave.
So with the rise in durable cotton goods,
denim made itself the accepted second skin
in terms of cloth that was
put into clothing
meant for laborious work.
As American cotton
manufacturing begins to sort of
find its footing in the 18-teens
and 1820s,
mills in Rhode Island,
mills in Massachusetts,
mills in New Hampshire,
they need a source of cotton.
And the only source of cotton to
make these mills
economically viable
is cotton that's being grown
by enslaved men, women,
and children in the American South.
Cotton from Alabama,
cotton from Louisiana,
Texas cotton, Mississippi cotton,
cotton from Georgia,
cotton from Charleston.
It takes two pounds of cotton
to make a pair of jeans.
When you follow
the trail of cotton being grown
in this country in the South,
being shipped to the North,
being woven into blue jeans,
and then being shipped down back
to the South,
where is it going?
Who's wearing it?
There's a database that's called
Freedom on the Move
that has cataloged and crowdsourced
runaway slave advertisements
from all over the United States.
So slavers would put an ad
describing the person
with detailed descriptions
of what they had on them
when they left.
What clothing they were wearing,
what type of clothing,
what color the clothing was.
"Had on when he left, dark
jeans clothes, and a black hat."
"He carried off a
blue cloth coat, one blue jeans,
and two or three pair
pantaloons."
"Has on a blue Kentucky
jeans coat and striped pants."
"wore a brown jeans
coat, and blue jeans pants..."
"New brown jeans."
"Mixed jeans,
frock coat, and pantaloons."
"A pair of jeans pants."
"a blue jeans homespun
dress coat."
And so you have
advertisements that have very
detailed information
about enslaved people.
And enslaved people were,
in fact, wearing jeans.
This is a story in which
coerced labor produces a raw material
that is exported from one region
to a second region
and which is then sold back
in an ongoing cycle.
An increasing number of
American slaves will come
to be wearing cloth that's manufactured
in the United States, that
travels under a number of names,
that sometimes goes under
an umbrella category of
"Negro cloth."
This is one of the powerful
things about clothing, right?
The ways in which it can be
used, not only for individuals
to perform their own identity,
but also for the ways in which
a dominant society can stigmatize people.
So blue jeans
clearly existed,
clearly predated Levi Strauss.
You're looking at farmers,
you're looking at factory workers.
Miners were wearing denim.
The enslaved peoples of America
were clothed very often in denim.
Basically
any type of labor, hard work,
that you can think of
in the late 19th century,
you would have found people wearing denim.
Jeans did exist,
but they ripped.
They ripped and they wore down
and they became tatters.
They became unusable.
They didn't last as long.
Anybody who has ever torn a seam
through exertion knows
that there are certain points
in garment structures
that are more stressed than others.
So Jacob Davis is really sort of
the unsung hero here.
Jacob Davis
was a tailor in Reno, Nevada,
or somewhere thereabouts in the 1870s.
Nevada was, you know,
one of the great bonanzas at the time.
There's this enormous rush of people.
And great fortunes are made
there from mining gold.
But the greatest fortunes
that are made there are not made
by individual prospectors.
They're made by the people
who can sell goods to miners.
So this lady
approached Jacob Davis and she said,
"I have a portly husband
who continues to rip
"his work pants,
and I'd like you to construct
a sturdy pair for him."
So he thought, "Well,
I have all these washer
"and post rivets that people
put on these saddles.
"Let's add these to all these
places he keeps
ripping his pants."
So he adds them to places like
the fly and mouths of pockets,
and even onto the mouth
of the back pocket,
which is a patch pocket.
Customer loved them.
Obviously, word of mouth spread.
Soon he had more customers
than he could handle,
and he wanted to scale up the business,
but he was one man in a
tailor shop in Reno, Nevada.
So he contacted Levi Strauss,
who was his dry good supplier
based in San Francisco,
and offered him a partnership deal.
He said, basically, "Let's go
into business together.
"We need a patent.
"We'll take out the patent,
"and then we can make these riveted pants,
because you have the wherewithal
to scale up."
Levi agreed.
The two of them filed for the
patent, and received it in 1873.
The basic design has not changed
in nearly a century and a half.
Today, every pair of Levi blue jeans
has six copper rivets
that ensure the longevity
of each pair of pants.
The rivets were crucial
in the design for durability.
It was like making
some kind of, you know,
armor for your body,
that could just hold up to anything.
With the
addition of the copper rivets,
the product becomes the most
durable form of workwear
available to any working American.
I'm looking for the ultimate jeans!
Hya!
At the end of the 19th century,
Americans were still largely
working with their hands.
Nearly 70% of workers
were toiling on farms,
in factories, mines, or construction.
This, of course, created
a huge market for jeans.
But jeans initially weren't called jeans.
They were called waist overalls.
Overalls were so prevalent
in the culture that jeans were
just a truncated version of overalls
without the bib.
That's where the term
"waist overalls" comes from.
So 1890,
17 years of patent exclusivity
for this rivet reinforced pocket
by Levi Strauss and Company ends.
Now anyone can use the rivet
reinforced pocket that wants to,
and everybody does it.
Once they
lose their patent protection,
there are rivets everywhere,
there are knockoff logos
and brands everywhere.
So you have
companies called Can't Bust 'Em,
Can't Rip 'Em,
and Never Rip and Never Wear Out.
There were brands
called Blackbear, Dubbleware, Dozfit.
And Fitsu.
Boss of the Road...
Tuf Nut.
Stronghold...
And so you have all these companies
trying to push their version
of the work pant
out into society,
and we start to see so much
evolution going on within jeans.
We started with
one pocket and a button fly.
There were no belt loops.
Most people wore suspenders.
But in mining you
can't have a strap over your shoulder
that could get snagged
and cause the mine to collapse.
So several folks had a rope tied
around the waistband.
Then a second pocket was added,
and there was also a waist cinch.
And then they added zippers...
Belt loops...
There was a rivet at the crotch.
People had been complaining
about it for years.
I think they were happy
to get rid of that rivet,
and that has never come back.
Denim was changing
and so was America.
That image of someone clad
in denim at the turn of
the 20th century is inevitably,
you know, romanticized.
And the reality is that people
of all different ages, races,
and genders were wearing denim
during this time.
Sharecroppers in the South,
Chinese immigrants on the
transcontinental railway...
As the word of the Gold Rush spreads
not only across the nation,
but across the whole world,
people really from all over the world
come through, and often stay in,
San Francisco.
Turning San Francisco overnight,
not only into a booming boom town,
but also into a place
where you have more diversity,
a more cosmopolitan place
than any other spot
on the face of the Earth.
There was a huge
nativist outcry in San Francisco
at the time...
the idea that other people
from elsewhere are coming to
take our jobs away.
The backlash galvanizes
an immense political movement,
who make it their central platform to
see the expulsion of Chinese labor.
There's a rise in racism
you do see in the 1880s and '90s...
"No Chinaman made your clothes,"
and "Made by white labor only."
Because Levi was
a San Francisco based company,
they decided, "Okay, we're not
hiring any Chinese people.
We're going to give the jobs to
the local white people."
I think it's a
challenge for us as we embrace
how we came to be here,
we have to embrace the whole
story and the whole history.
Jeans are a great example to
think about American history
and a way to go into parts
of American history
that we haven't always addressed.
During the Great
Depression and the Farm Securities Act,
and the contracting of
photographers to go about
the country to document everyday life,
denim became symbolic of our nation.
You see people on the West Coast
wearing jeans,
and people laboring
in the ports and the shipyards.
You see people
in the Empire State sitting on
I-beams during lunch breaks.
And you see tobacco farmers
with sun-faded overalls
and it became this common identity
that I think helps the country
to still feel unified
even during dark times.
The
knives are cutting; the load piles high.
The sun beats down from the August sky.
We built our freedom
and strength this way.
We're building it still together.
Up until about the 1930s,
denim was really worn out of necessity.
When we
get together we're hard to stop.
Working together...
It wasn't until those
years and beyond that the product
went from a necessity to a fashion.
A lot of that had to do with
this nostalgia
for the American West.
Hey, come back with them horses!
Thanks to westerns,
cowboys became the American figure
that kind of helped us get out
of the Great Depression
in a way.
We didn't have royalty
like in England and other
European countries,
but we had cowboys
wearing blue jeans.
Thank you so much.
They
were our knights in shining armor.
Follow me, ma'am,
and you'll never go astray.
Right this way.
It's hard for people
today to really appreciate
how big the western was.
As the United States is
transformed from being
a rural and agrarian nation
to one in which most people
live in cities or towns,
there is a nostalgic embrace
of the frontier world lost,
and the cowboys in those
westerns almost always
were wearing jeans.
And yet, there's no question
that when we look more closely
at the ways in which jeans
come into the West,
the story turns out to be much
more problematic.
The stories we tell are all white people.
In fact, the reality of life
in the American West
was much more multi-ethnic.
You know, a significant portion
of the workforce
were people of color...
people from Mexico,
Native Americans,
African Americans
probably making up an eighth
to a quarter of the cowboy workforce.
So we have a much more complicated reality
that contrasts with the whitening
of those figures in the westerns.
Of course,
Hollywood's take on the cowboy
was just the start of denim spreading
beyond the working class.
Now this shift is, is happening
in an era of huge economic schisms.
The vast majority of people
were really struggling
during the Great Depression,
but there continued to be
an elite class of individuals.
They still traveled.
They still shopped.
One consequence at the time
was that this idea of the
dude ranch came about.
The dude ranch was essentially
a getaway, like sort of a spa
getaway for wealthy Easterners.
Because of the collapse
of many of the sources of income
based on cattle ranching
and other traditional
agricultural pursuits,
many working cattle ranches
turned their attention to dudes,
which was a more reliable source
of income.
Many of these
ranches were very remote.
It might take two weeks to even
travel by train and horseback.
They were expensive.
They accepted paying guests
to participate in all the ranch chores...
to herd cattle, to brand cattle.
This was particularly
an opportunity for women.
American society was still not
fully comfortable with the idea
of women wearing pants in the 1930s.
Bifurcated garments seemed so unladylike.
Vacationing
was a secure laboratory...
especially for the women.
When they looked in the mirror,
which I think many dudines did,
they didn't see their old self
from Connecticut
or Rhode Island;
they saw a cowgirl from the movies.
Denim afforded many women the
ability to get dirty, to hunt,
to fish, to ride horses.
So I think blue jeans on a dude ranch
not only gave women the ability
to move more freely,
to experience their bodies
in different ways,
but perhaps also to sort of
think more freely,
to rethink their position
in American society.
This was one of
the first times that women felt
comfortable enough to say,
"Hey, you know what?
"I enjoy wearing that kind of clothing.
I'm going to do it."
So the American
blue jeans manufacturers
realized that there was
a substantial market to be conquered
by creating blue jeans lines for women.
So you start seeing the design of jeans
beginning to follow fashion
in a way that they didn't previously do
when they were strictly work pants.
Jeans entered the
world of fashion in the 1930s
because they functioned as a souvenir
and they also functioned as a
symbol of wealth and prestige.
Somewhat ironically,
the clothes of the working man
became a symbol that you
belonged to the leisure class.
That's the dichotomy
sort of represented in the juxtaposition
between the Dorothea Lange
photos of the Dust Bowl
and Lady Levi's in "Vogue."
They can co-exist
because there was this extreme
inequality in America.
Since October 16, 1940,
millions of American men
have joined the armed forces
to defend our country and
our democratic way of life.
For many men and women,
World War II was the first time
they wore jeans.
The minute
the ship left port, neckties were dropped.
The enlisted men wore dungarees
and the traditional white hats
were dyed blue.
Here are the men who will fight.
World War II is a moment where
denim goes global in a sense.
One result of Americans fighting
overseas was that the G.I.s,
when they were off duty,
were in many cases wearing blue jeans,
and the locals took notice
and thought, "Well,
they look like movie stars,
"they look cool.
They look like, you know,
what we want to look like."
There's a
way in which during the 1940s,
because of the patriotism
around World War II,
denim almost became the blue
in the red, white, and blue
of the American flag.
You know and Rosie the Riveter
is a kind of classic example of this.
"Rosie the Riveter"
was a Norman Rockwell painting
that ended up on the cover of
"The Saturday Evening Post."
She was like the American everywoman,
who when the menfolk were away
fighting the war in Europe,
she pitched in,
she did her part.
With so many
of the men overseas,
something like six million
mothers and daughters
were suddenly going to work
on a daily basis,
and to a large extent wearing denim.
Waitress, salesgirls, housewives...
these girls are now ready
to tackle the work
of producing weapons and equipment
essential to our armed forces.
- A
- day of days for America and her allies.
How jubilant was the taste of victory.
How sweet the rewards of peace.
From all the scattered
battlefields, he returned home
again to find a soldier's welcome.
So, what happens
when the soldiers who were wearing
denim overseas come home?
They kept wearing denim.
Why not?
They're great pants.
They're comfortable.
They're durable.
They had gotten used to them.
They liked them.
Why not?
As the World
War II vets started to come back,
they obviously had been through a lot.
They felt a lot of camaraderie.
They felt a lot of brotherhood
in the trenches.
And they come back
into a very staid,
kind of 9:00 to 5:00 lifestyle,
for some people it wasn't going to work.
But the combination
of a big motorcycle and denim,
that really works.
They've all got jeans on.
T-shirt with a cigarette pack
rolled up in it...
you look pretty tough.
Suddenly bikers have become
modern-day outlaws.
So the idea of the outlaw,
which has always had
a stronghold on the American
popular imagination,
was actually promoted by the movies,
and linked in particular with jeans.
You know, we see that a lot
in the Hollywood of the 1950s,
classically represented by Marlon Brando
in the biker film
"The Wild One."
Brando's character, who was,
of course, the guy who's asked,
"What are you rebelling
against?"
Hey Johnny, what are you
rebelling against?
And he says... What do you got?
Like, "I don't know what it is
that I'm rebelling against.
I'm just doing it."
All bets were off at that point.
A lot of the teenagers
may not have wanted to become
Wally or Beaver.
But my friends call me Beaver.
Well, may I call you Beaver?
I'd like you to be my friend.
Okay.
They were able to make the choice,
and part of that choice
was, you know, having jeans on.
The early
teens are years of upheaval and turmoil.
They're years of physical
and glandular change.
Parents of almost every child
find the age of puberty
or early adolescence
full of problems.
After World War II,
really the "teenager" as we now
know it came into being.
Their actions may seem
excessive but that's normal for teenagers.
They seem to spend hours in
completely useless activities.
Prior to World War II,
you were either a young person
living at home,
going to school,
or when you were finished with school,
then you entered the workforce.
You were contributing
to the family income.
After World War II,
the middle class exploded.
Families could offer their kids
more leisure time,
more independence.
The rock and roll
teenage cowboy.
The American consumer economy
was booming and it just became
the American way of life:
spend money, buy things,
dress up, you know,
move up the food chain.
Gather 'round, kiddies.
Today I'm going to give you
a quick look-see
at what the well-dressed teenager is doing
in the way of fun and fashion.
If teenagers decided to work,
they could use that money
for their own benefit,
for their own leisure time.
They could buy their own cars.
They bought their own records.
They sort of helped create rock and roll.
Teenagers... they're terrific.
Jeans got sort of
irreparably linked
with cool.
And coolness became the ideal
to strive for.
Kay's
mother may have other opinions of style
of what looks best.
But of course mother has
old-fashioned ideas.
It's like, "What mom and dad want to do?
"Oh my God.
I can't even talk to them.
I do not want to wear
what they're wearing."
The adolescent is self-centered.
The charisma
of deviance is powerful.
Their sloppiness
is so deliberate as to be offensive.
So during the
1950s, denim becomes increasingly
associated with biker gangs
and juvenile delinquency.
There was a sort of fear,
I think, among adults that
if teenagers put on a pair of jeans,
they were automatically going
to become delinquents
in some way.
School systems
literally started banning blue jeans
because they identified
the kids who wore them
as the "bad seeds."
They were going to, you know,
beat up a little old lady
and steal her pocketbook or, or whatever.
The parents'
generation started to clamp down,
which caused a dip in sales.
Suddenly families were
shying away from buying blue jeans.
The denim
companies start to get worried.
As a result, a lot of the major companies
band together to form what
they called the Denim Council.
More people
than ever are wearing denim.
You'd have to look far and wide
to find an American of any age
who has never worn blue jeans.
So they start this
whole campaign first to try to counter
the "bad" blue jean look with
the "wholesome" blue jean look.
"This is the right way to wear jeans,"
and it's neat with a nice shirt
and this very kind of healthy-looking kid.
And then,
"This is the bad blue jean."
And so it's the more the kid
like with his hair hanging down, greasy,
and all that kind of stuff.
Like, see?
There is a difference.
You can be a good kid and wear blue jeans.
Denim
is really great for sports.
Looks like this joker
is knocking himself out
trying to prove it.
Folks wear jeans to get the work done
and jeans to relax in.
They tried
to create a National Denim Day.
They had all sorts of
campaigns around the country
which are all about
the discovery of America.
They are about cowboys,
they are about adventure,
and history.
Blue denim is
a symbol of our pioneering spirit.
It goes right back
to the beginning of America.
Men in blue denim opened up the old West,
and built our bridges and skyscrapers.
That series of advertisements
helped reverse the trend
away from blue jeans.
In the last few months
more applications for the
Peace Corps have come to us.
By the first years of the 1960s,
the Peace Corps, JFK's initiative
sending young Americans out
across the globe
to do good deeds,
they were actually dressed in blue jeans.
That was their uniform.
So no longer was it that
the bad kids were the only ones
wearing blue jeans.
One thing in particular
that's interesting about this period
is the denim companies
spend all this time in the 1950s
trying to get away from the rebel image
and then the 1960s happens.
Hippies
made a colorful scene with wild costumes,
uninhibited dancing,
and general high frolicking.
When we think about
the denim story in the 1960s,
we almost automatically think
of the hippies,
with their bellbottoms, and tie-dye,
but the hippies weren't the only
people wearing those clothes.
A man dies
when he refuses to stand up for justice.
A man dies when he refuses to take a stand
for that which is true.
So we're going to stand up right here.
The classic
image of the Civil Rights Movement
is Martin Luther King Jr.
And he and many of his closest partners
wore suits and button down shirts,
sort of a "Sunday best" approach.
We will be able to join hands
and sing in the words
of the old Negro spiritual,
free at last, free at last,
thank God Almighty we are free at last.
Being a man of African descent,
a lot hinged on his self-representation.
He needed to present himself to the world
as a respectable person,
because there was already
a notch against him
for being a Black man.
The focus on the Sunday best
has obscured the fact that
at that time there were
these young college students who say,
"Instead, we're going to wear
denim because we want to show
"that our political bonds
are to the Black working poor
and not to the Black bourgeois."
These young people, once they
left Howard University,
Fisk University,
Tougaloo College, to head south,
say, "We're going to wear
this denim alongside
"the working class and
sharecroppers who had been
"trying for decades
to fight for their right
to vote."
They were rebels with a cause.
For young Black
protesters, it absolutely is risky
with what they're wearing
because they already have
the systemic pressure
up against them presuming that they are
of a lower class or status in society.
And so wearing a certain style
of dress that is aligned
with the laboring class,
that is absolutely bold.
As this Southern
movement spreads and garners
national media attention,
you now have white students
who decide to go south
to help with the organizing.
So when those
white students go back north,
they go back wearing denim.
This becomes
the look of youth rebellion
in the 1960s.
They represent
a new form of social rebellion.
They dress in bizarre and colorful ways.
Hippies are very interesting...
The 1960s is a
pivotal point in the history of denim.
They are
hip, onto something good.
Just like for the
Civil Rights Movement,
for the hippies,
clothing was a form of political activism.
Of course it's a
whole different way of living,
it's a whole different way of thinking.
So many of the civilians have no concept.
But it's fun.
It's fun to be bizarre.
There was
such an emphasis with the counterculture
on creativity, on individuality,
self-expression.
People then
embellished their jeans.
They sewed fringe on them...
They put feathers.
They were
patched... - Painted...
Embroidered and shredded...
All of the sudden your jeans
were your canvases.
There was a cool factor.
And when rock stars and
musicians started wearing denim,
it became even cooler.
There was The Who, and Janis Joplin,
and the Doors, the Rolling
Stones, Led Zeppelin.
So then everyone wanted to wear them.
"Woodstock"... that movie
completely expanded our idea of fashion.
I know for me being this kid
in North Carolina,
when I saw that movie, I'm like,
"I want to
wear clothes like that."
Denim was
the uniform of that generation,
and a lot of the denim companies
started to capitalize on that.
It's interesting
to look at that case study of Levi's,
because in the 1950s
they tried so hard to get away
from the counterculture.
And then by 1971,
they use an aerial shot of the crowd
at a music festival
and just slap a Levi's logo
on it, and that's it!
It's been said
that "Those children of the '60s
came in as a tribe
and went out as a market."
They were the market for blue jeans.
By the time
you get into the early '70s,
hippie chic is everywhere.
The fashion
industry becomes wildly taken
with these young radicals.
You have designers with ads
that suggested that,
"The real freedom movement
is in your jeans."
It is ironic, isn't it?
Rewind like a decade earlier,
youth were sort of wearing denim
as a form of rebellion.
By the time we get to the 1970s,
like denim is being commodified.
The fashion industry co-opts
authentic subcultural styles
and then makes them part of the system.
Whether it seems dangerous
or seems totally trivial,
the fashion industry takes any
cool look or stance
and markets it if sees an audience for it.
We start to see
denim jeans become just a very
lucrative product.
They were really a great blank canvas
for designers to express themselves.
When I was 16 years old,
I was enamored with music and musicians,
and I couldn't play
so I couldn't be a musician,
but I wanted to look like a rock star.
So I opened a small shop
called People's Place
and started selling jeans.
At one point I was thinking,
"I think I could design
better jeans than we're buying
from vendors."
The fashion industry realizes
that there's this massive market
for all things denim.
Now it's sleek, high-rise, tight...
There becomes a certain kind of
glamor associated with jeans
for the first time.
It was a turning point,
which became the era of designer jeans.
There was Gloria Vanderbilt,
Calvin Klein...
There was
Halston... - Sasson...
- Fiorucci...
- Sergio Valente...
We were really trying to outdo
one another with sexiness.
But when Brooke Shields, as a young teen,
was the Calvin Klein poster
girl, I think heads turned.
You wanna know what comes
between me and my Calvins?
Nothing.
Calvin Klein Jeans.
Everyone said,
"Okay, well, this is going to
a whole new level."
It is like a tidal
wave over the whole industry.
People started actually
verbalizing what everyone
had known for a hundred years,
that blue jeans are sexy.
By the late '70s, designer jeans
were chipping away
at the fashion hierarchy.
They make it acceptable for anyone
to wear a pair of jeans
at any time or place.
Jeans undermine the idea
of what fashion was supposed to be.
They were part of a more general
democratization of fashion.
It suddenly became possible to wear jeans
in almost all settings.
In the late 1970s
around the Bronx in New York City,
we start to see hip hop emerge.
And denim jeans become this
sort of a uniform.
For African Americans,
a pair of designer jeans
came with a lot of value.
That's why we get language
coming straight out of hip hop,
like "fresh," "dope," "fly."
You know, because that spoke
to the value of clothing.
Hip hop changed
denim in a very big way.
The hip hop stars started going
on tour and doing MTV videos
wearing really cool clothes.
The way in which it was worn
was very different.
In the early '80s,
with bands like Run DMC,
it's just more of a straight look,
but then it becomes more baggy.
And then they started
to wear brands like Ralph Lauren,
and Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger.
Those brands represented a lifestyle that
historically African Americans
had been excluded from.
I want to thank Snoop Doggy Dog
and everybody on the show.
So wonderful...
I mean when we
think about those brands,
we think about the country club
or yachting.
By putting a brand like
Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger
on their backs,
they were changing the meaning
of the brand.
This brand that's associated
with all-American identity
or whiteness becomes associated
with like hip hop culture.
Not only do we
see hip hop artists able to remix
sounds, and, you know,
like in music, but they're also
able to take clothing
and remix it for their own means.
To get your hands
on that clothing and wear it
is subversive in a way.
Because it is saying, "I'm not
supposed to be wearing this,
but look at me, I am."
Hip hop really helped to take command
of the denim narrative.
Bring it!
K7 and the Swing Kids!
Peace!
Jeans are probably
the single most iconic garment
of the 20th century.
Each generation
keeps rediscovering how jeans
can be meaningful for them.
Blue jeans are an amazing thing
for anyone trying to tell
a broader history of the United States.
It allows you to talk about slavery.
It allows you to talk about
fashion and consumerism.
It allows you to talk about cool
and the invention of cool.
And to have all of these things
under the same heading
is really quite remarkable.
Denim and its
history is a perfect metaphor
for where we find ourselves
as a culture right now.
Becoming much more aware of the silences,
of those groups
that have been pushed to the side.
Exposing and celebrating
these narratives that haven't made it into
that typical telling of jeans
is part of the work to change
our understanding
of American history.
It's a long
journey from "Negro cloth"
to hip hop denim and baggy jeans
ruling the denim market
in the 1990s.
As I sit here in a denim jacket,
you know, it's clear to me that
we can see the rich tapestry
of where we've been as a people,
as a nation.
The thing about the denim jean
is it tells a story about who we are.
It's a garment that's almost
like keeping the fingerprints
of our history...
the creases, the tears, all of it.
You know, you can repair it all you want,
mend it all you want,
but the scars of that, you know,
the memory, that material memory
will remain there.
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You don't
really stop and think about why
half of the population
of the planet is wearing them
on any given day.
We just are.
Have you ever asked yourself
why everyone you know
owns multiple pairs of jeans?
Dress it up, dress it down...
People
know that when they wear them
they look cool.
This one garment can be both
universal and individual at the same time.
There is nothing like that
in the history of clothing.
And, in fact,
Yves Saint Laurent said he wished
he had invented jeans,
that he thought they were
the most important item of
fashion in the 20th century.
They wore them in the mines,
on the cattle trails.
My own father wore them toppling
200-foot Douglas firs.
Jeans are the quintessential
American garment.
120 years later, gentlemen,
blue jeans are still basically
the same pair of pants
that came out of the California Gold Rush.
But so much
of the story we tell about jeans
is a myth.
The
strongest pants the West has ever seen.
It is about
the cowboys, and the West,
it's about Levi Strauss,
and the Gold Rush.
It's always the same story...
After the
cowboys, jeans got picked up
by rockers and bikers and hippies
and now everybody wears them.
But denim has been around
much, much longer.
It has a long and deep history
with so many other fascinating stories
that are not always told.
In 1850, Levi
Strauss invented the toughest pants
the West had ever known:
Levi's blue jeans.
Blue jeans do
represent American culture
to the rest of the world,
but like any other good
product of America,
you know, we, we borrow all the best ideas
from, from everywhere.
The real fact of the matter is
that blue jeans themselves
originated somewhere else.
The story of denim jeans
is so much more than Wrangler,
it's more than Levi Strauss,
especially when it comes to the material.
We're not quite sure
exactly where the fabric originated,
but there are several hints.
One is Dungri, India, where as
early as the 17th century,
they were creating
a coarse cloth for workers,
eventually called dungaree.
There's the Genoans of Italy,
who had a type of sail cloth
that was fashioned into work pants.
And there's Nimes, France,
where the cloth there was known
as "serge de Nimes."
Not always, but very often,
these various types of cloth
were dyed blue,
probably to hide dirt as much as anything.
So, we have blue "jean" from Genoa,
we have blue "de Nimes" or denim
coming from Nimes,
but when we make it into pants in America,
we end up morphing the garment
into blue jeans.
People don't necessarily
think about how their blue jeans
came to be blue.
Historically, that's because of
the indigo dye.
Centuries ago, indigo was said
to be worth its weight in gold.
Competition for it was so fierce
Europeans actually called it
the "devil's dye."
Indigo is in fact a weed.
The process of turning indigo
from this small green leaf
into a dye is a very delicate process;
so only the most skilled
are able to do this.
One of the neatest
things about dying with indigo
is the dye vat is green;
it's not blue.
And when you introduce a fabric
like denim to the dye vat,
it comes out green.
And then, as it oxidizes in
our atmosphere, it turns blue.
It is magic.
Indigo dyeing is magic.
In many cultures,
indigo cloth has a spiritual importance.
In Africa, the cloth
is considered the next layer
to the skin.
It holds the person's soul, their spirit.
Africans have had a long history
of working indigo and knew
the special process involved
in making the dye
and in dyeing cloth.
And of course many
African captives who became enslaved
in the new world brought with
them knowledge of how
to extract the blue from the plant,
and how to fix the blue to fabrics.
Indigo is one of the ways
in which slave-holding
became tied to the economic fortunes
of the colonial experiment
in the Americas.
So in the
mid-1700s, there was this labor
that had been extracted from Africa,
and indigo presents itself as this thing
with economic possibility.
And then when you add to it
moving the dye stuff from one
end of the world to the other,
it only increased in value.
And Eliza Lucas benefited enormously
from the impact of this trade.
Eliza Lucas has
been credited as literally producing
indigo in America.
She's been credited as a botanist.
She's even written about
in elementary school
and high school textbooks.
Eliza Lucas was the
daughter of a colonial governor.
She had studied botany,
and when Eliza was a teenager,
her father bought her,
among many other plants, indigo.
The gift
came from perhaps Antigua.
The South needed something
to add to crop rotation, and tobacco
was something cultivated here.
Rice was cultivated here.
Adding indigo into your crop rotation
was a way to find additional profit.
Once Eliza gets
her hands on the indigo seeds,
it takes off in terms of production.
Indigo was a second cash crop
behind rice in South Carolina.
And on the eve of the American Revolution,
more than a million pounds of indigo
was being shipped overseas.
Eliza Lucas was probably one of
the most well-known producers
of indigo in colonial America.
But Eliza's hands weren't blue.
She didn't get her hands dirty
with the indigo crop.
The knowledge to grow indigo
came from enslaved people.
They're the ones that did
the work that allowed her
to become this great planter
that she's been credited for.
Indigo really encapsulates
this problem of how do we begin
to tell the story
of captive people and how we document
their contributions in America,
and to the denim history in particular.
We know the names
of all the enslaved people that were owned
by the Lucas and Pinckney family.
"Isaac, Pompey,
Molly, and their child, Nanny...
Mary and her children,
Prince and Be..."
These are generations of families.
We're not just talking about
a husband and a wife,
or a mom and a dad.
We see grandparents on this list.
"Nanny and her children. Juno..."
They're the ones
that came from communities that dyed
all kinds of cloth in beautiful colors.
They're the ones that had
the knowledge of indigo
and created generations
of wealth for these
white slave-holding families.
Back in the 19th century,
denim really dominated,
because it's a strong weave.
So with the rise in durable cotton goods,
denim made itself the accepted second skin
in terms of cloth that was
put into clothing
meant for laborious work.
As American cotton
manufacturing begins to sort of
find its footing in the 18-teens
and 1820s,
mills in Rhode Island,
mills in Massachusetts,
mills in New Hampshire,
they need a source of cotton.
And the only source of cotton to
make these mills
economically viable
is cotton that's being grown
by enslaved men, women,
and children in the American South.
Cotton from Alabama,
cotton from Louisiana,
Texas cotton, Mississippi cotton,
cotton from Georgia,
cotton from Charleston.
It takes two pounds of cotton
to make a pair of jeans.
When you follow
the trail of cotton being grown
in this country in the South,
being shipped to the North,
being woven into blue jeans,
and then being shipped down back
to the South,
where is it going?
Who's wearing it?
There's a database that's called
Freedom on the Move
that has cataloged and crowdsourced
runaway slave advertisements
from all over the United States.
So slavers would put an ad
describing the person
with detailed descriptions
of what they had on them
when they left.
What clothing they were wearing,
what type of clothing,
what color the clothing was.
"Had on when he left, dark
jeans clothes, and a black hat."
"He carried off a
blue cloth coat, one blue jeans,
and two or three pair
pantaloons."
"Has on a blue Kentucky
jeans coat and striped pants."
"wore a brown jeans
coat, and blue jeans pants..."
"New brown jeans."
"Mixed jeans,
frock coat, and pantaloons."
"A pair of jeans pants."
"a blue jeans homespun
dress coat."
And so you have
advertisements that have very
detailed information
about enslaved people.
And enslaved people were,
in fact, wearing jeans.
This is a story in which
coerced labor produces a raw material
that is exported from one region
to a second region
and which is then sold back
in an ongoing cycle.
An increasing number of
American slaves will come
to be wearing cloth that's manufactured
in the United States, that
travels under a number of names,
that sometimes goes under
an umbrella category of
"Negro cloth."
This is one of the powerful
things about clothing, right?
The ways in which it can be
used, not only for individuals
to perform their own identity,
but also for the ways in which
a dominant society can stigmatize people.
So blue jeans
clearly existed,
clearly predated Levi Strauss.
You're looking at farmers,
you're looking at factory workers.
Miners were wearing denim.
The enslaved peoples of America
were clothed very often in denim.
Basically
any type of labor, hard work,
that you can think of
in the late 19th century,
you would have found people wearing denim.
Jeans did exist,
but they ripped.
They ripped and they wore down
and they became tatters.
They became unusable.
They didn't last as long.
Anybody who has ever torn a seam
through exertion knows
that there are certain points
in garment structures
that are more stressed than others.
So Jacob Davis is really sort of
the unsung hero here.
Jacob Davis
was a tailor in Reno, Nevada,
or somewhere thereabouts in the 1870s.
Nevada was, you know,
one of the great bonanzas at the time.
There's this enormous rush of people.
And great fortunes are made
there from mining gold.
But the greatest fortunes
that are made there are not made
by individual prospectors.
They're made by the people
who can sell goods to miners.
So this lady
approached Jacob Davis and she said,
"I have a portly husband
who continues to rip
"his work pants,
and I'd like you to construct
a sturdy pair for him."
So he thought, "Well,
I have all these washer
"and post rivets that people
put on these saddles.
"Let's add these to all these
places he keeps
ripping his pants."
So he adds them to places like
the fly and mouths of pockets,
and even onto the mouth
of the back pocket,
which is a patch pocket.
Customer loved them.
Obviously, word of mouth spread.
Soon he had more customers
than he could handle,
and he wanted to scale up the business,
but he was one man in a
tailor shop in Reno, Nevada.
So he contacted Levi Strauss,
who was his dry good supplier
based in San Francisco,
and offered him a partnership deal.
He said, basically, "Let's go
into business together.
"We need a patent.
"We'll take out the patent,
"and then we can make these riveted pants,
because you have the wherewithal
to scale up."
Levi agreed.
The two of them filed for the
patent, and received it in 1873.
The basic design has not changed
in nearly a century and a half.
Today, every pair of Levi blue jeans
has six copper rivets
that ensure the longevity
of each pair of pants.
The rivets were crucial
in the design for durability.
It was like making
some kind of, you know,
armor for your body,
that could just hold up to anything.
With the
addition of the copper rivets,
the product becomes the most
durable form of workwear
available to any working American.
I'm looking for the ultimate jeans!
Hya!
At the end of the 19th century,
Americans were still largely
working with their hands.
Nearly 70% of workers
were toiling on farms,
in factories, mines, or construction.
This, of course, created
a huge market for jeans.
But jeans initially weren't called jeans.
They were called waist overalls.
Overalls were so prevalent
in the culture that jeans were
just a truncated version of overalls
without the bib.
That's where the term
"waist overalls" comes from.
So 1890,
17 years of patent exclusivity
for this rivet reinforced pocket
by Levi Strauss and Company ends.
Now anyone can use the rivet
reinforced pocket that wants to,
and everybody does it.
Once they
lose their patent protection,
there are rivets everywhere,
there are knockoff logos
and brands everywhere.
So you have
companies called Can't Bust 'Em,
Can't Rip 'Em,
and Never Rip and Never Wear Out.
There were brands
called Blackbear, Dubbleware, Dozfit.
And Fitsu.
Boss of the Road...
Tuf Nut.
Stronghold...
And so you have all these companies
trying to push their version
of the work pant
out into society,
and we start to see so much
evolution going on within jeans.
We started with
one pocket and a button fly.
There were no belt loops.
Most people wore suspenders.
But in mining you
can't have a strap over your shoulder
that could get snagged
and cause the mine to collapse.
So several folks had a rope tied
around the waistband.
Then a second pocket was added,
and there was also a waist cinch.
And then they added zippers...
Belt loops...
There was a rivet at the crotch.
People had been complaining
about it for years.
I think they were happy
to get rid of that rivet,
and that has never come back.
Denim was changing
and so was America.
That image of someone clad
in denim at the turn of
the 20th century is inevitably,
you know, romanticized.
And the reality is that people
of all different ages, races,
and genders were wearing denim
during this time.
Sharecroppers in the South,
Chinese immigrants on the
transcontinental railway...
As the word of the Gold Rush spreads
not only across the nation,
but across the whole world,
people really from all over the world
come through, and often stay in,
San Francisco.
Turning San Francisco overnight,
not only into a booming boom town,
but also into a place
where you have more diversity,
a more cosmopolitan place
than any other spot
on the face of the Earth.
There was a huge
nativist outcry in San Francisco
at the time...
the idea that other people
from elsewhere are coming to
take our jobs away.
The backlash galvanizes
an immense political movement,
who make it their central platform to
see the expulsion of Chinese labor.
There's a rise in racism
you do see in the 1880s and '90s...
"No Chinaman made your clothes,"
and "Made by white labor only."
Because Levi was
a San Francisco based company,
they decided, "Okay, we're not
hiring any Chinese people.
We're going to give the jobs to
the local white people."
I think it's a
challenge for us as we embrace
how we came to be here,
we have to embrace the whole
story and the whole history.
Jeans are a great example to
think about American history
and a way to go into parts
of American history
that we haven't always addressed.
During the Great
Depression and the Farm Securities Act,
and the contracting of
photographers to go about
the country to document everyday life,
denim became symbolic of our nation.
You see people on the West Coast
wearing jeans,
and people laboring
in the ports and the shipyards.
You see people
in the Empire State sitting on
I-beams during lunch breaks.
And you see tobacco farmers
with sun-faded overalls
and it became this common identity
that I think helps the country
to still feel unified
even during dark times.
The
knives are cutting; the load piles high.
The sun beats down from the August sky.
We built our freedom
and strength this way.
We're building it still together.
Up until about the 1930s,
denim was really worn out of necessity.
When we
get together we're hard to stop.
Working together...
It wasn't until those
years and beyond that the product
went from a necessity to a fashion.
A lot of that had to do with
this nostalgia
for the American West.
Hey, come back with them horses!
Thanks to westerns,
cowboys became the American figure
that kind of helped us get out
of the Great Depression
in a way.
We didn't have royalty
like in England and other
European countries,
but we had cowboys
wearing blue jeans.
Thank you so much.
They
were our knights in shining armor.
Follow me, ma'am,
and you'll never go astray.
Right this way.
It's hard for people
today to really appreciate
how big the western was.
As the United States is
transformed from being
a rural and agrarian nation
to one in which most people
live in cities or towns,
there is a nostalgic embrace
of the frontier world lost,
and the cowboys in those
westerns almost always
were wearing jeans.
And yet, there's no question
that when we look more closely
at the ways in which jeans
come into the West,
the story turns out to be much
more problematic.
The stories we tell are all white people.
In fact, the reality of life
in the American West
was much more multi-ethnic.
You know, a significant portion
of the workforce
were people of color...
people from Mexico,
Native Americans,
African Americans
probably making up an eighth
to a quarter of the cowboy workforce.
So we have a much more complicated reality
that contrasts with the whitening
of those figures in the westerns.
Of course,
Hollywood's take on the cowboy
was just the start of denim spreading
beyond the working class.
Now this shift is, is happening
in an era of huge economic schisms.
The vast majority of people
were really struggling
during the Great Depression,
but there continued to be
an elite class of individuals.
They still traveled.
They still shopped.
One consequence at the time
was that this idea of the
dude ranch came about.
The dude ranch was essentially
a getaway, like sort of a spa
getaway for wealthy Easterners.
Because of the collapse
of many of the sources of income
based on cattle ranching
and other traditional
agricultural pursuits,
many working cattle ranches
turned their attention to dudes,
which was a more reliable source
of income.
Many of these
ranches were very remote.
It might take two weeks to even
travel by train and horseback.
They were expensive.
They accepted paying guests
to participate in all the ranch chores...
to herd cattle, to brand cattle.
This was particularly
an opportunity for women.
American society was still not
fully comfortable with the idea
of women wearing pants in the 1930s.
Bifurcated garments seemed so unladylike.
Vacationing
was a secure laboratory...
especially for the women.
When they looked in the mirror,
which I think many dudines did,
they didn't see their old self
from Connecticut
or Rhode Island;
they saw a cowgirl from the movies.
Denim afforded many women the
ability to get dirty, to hunt,
to fish, to ride horses.
So I think blue jeans on a dude ranch
not only gave women the ability
to move more freely,
to experience their bodies
in different ways,
but perhaps also to sort of
think more freely,
to rethink their position
in American society.
This was one of
the first times that women felt
comfortable enough to say,
"Hey, you know what?
"I enjoy wearing that kind of clothing.
I'm going to do it."
So the American
blue jeans manufacturers
realized that there was
a substantial market to be conquered
by creating blue jeans lines for women.
So you start seeing the design of jeans
beginning to follow fashion
in a way that they didn't previously do
when they were strictly work pants.
Jeans entered the
world of fashion in the 1930s
because they functioned as a souvenir
and they also functioned as a
symbol of wealth and prestige.
Somewhat ironically,
the clothes of the working man
became a symbol that you
belonged to the leisure class.
That's the dichotomy
sort of represented in the juxtaposition
between the Dorothea Lange
photos of the Dust Bowl
and Lady Levi's in "Vogue."
They can co-exist
because there was this extreme
inequality in America.
Since October 16, 1940,
millions of American men
have joined the armed forces
to defend our country and
our democratic way of life.
For many men and women,
World War II was the first time
they wore jeans.
The minute
the ship left port, neckties were dropped.
The enlisted men wore dungarees
and the traditional white hats
were dyed blue.
Here are the men who will fight.
World War II is a moment where
denim goes global in a sense.
One result of Americans fighting
overseas was that the G.I.s,
when they were off duty,
were in many cases wearing blue jeans,
and the locals took notice
and thought, "Well,
they look like movie stars,
"they look cool.
They look like, you know,
what we want to look like."
There's a
way in which during the 1940s,
because of the patriotism
around World War II,
denim almost became the blue
in the red, white, and blue
of the American flag.
You know and Rosie the Riveter
is a kind of classic example of this.
"Rosie the Riveter"
was a Norman Rockwell painting
that ended up on the cover of
"The Saturday Evening Post."
She was like the American everywoman,
who when the menfolk were away
fighting the war in Europe,
she pitched in,
she did her part.
With so many
of the men overseas,
something like six million
mothers and daughters
were suddenly going to work
on a daily basis,
and to a large extent wearing denim.
Waitress, salesgirls, housewives...
these girls are now ready
to tackle the work
of producing weapons and equipment
essential to our armed forces.
- A
- day of days for America and her allies.
How jubilant was the taste of victory.
How sweet the rewards of peace.
From all the scattered
battlefields, he returned home
again to find a soldier's welcome.
So, what happens
when the soldiers who were wearing
denim overseas come home?
They kept wearing denim.
Why not?
They're great pants.
They're comfortable.
They're durable.
They had gotten used to them.
They liked them.
Why not?
As the World
War II vets started to come back,
they obviously had been through a lot.
They felt a lot of camaraderie.
They felt a lot of brotherhood
in the trenches.
And they come back
into a very staid,
kind of 9:00 to 5:00 lifestyle,
for some people it wasn't going to work.
But the combination
of a big motorcycle and denim,
that really works.
They've all got jeans on.
T-shirt with a cigarette pack
rolled up in it...
you look pretty tough.
Suddenly bikers have become
modern-day outlaws.
So the idea of the outlaw,
which has always had
a stronghold on the American
popular imagination,
was actually promoted by the movies,
and linked in particular with jeans.
You know, we see that a lot
in the Hollywood of the 1950s,
classically represented by Marlon Brando
in the biker film
"The Wild One."
Brando's character, who was,
of course, the guy who's asked,
"What are you rebelling
against?"
Hey Johnny, what are you
rebelling against?
And he says... What do you got?
Like, "I don't know what it is
that I'm rebelling against.
I'm just doing it."
All bets were off at that point.
A lot of the teenagers
may not have wanted to become
Wally or Beaver.
But my friends call me Beaver.
Well, may I call you Beaver?
I'd like you to be my friend.
Okay.
They were able to make the choice,
and part of that choice
was, you know, having jeans on.
The early
teens are years of upheaval and turmoil.
They're years of physical
and glandular change.
Parents of almost every child
find the age of puberty
or early adolescence
full of problems.
After World War II,
really the "teenager" as we now
know it came into being.
Their actions may seem
excessive but that's normal for teenagers.
They seem to spend hours in
completely useless activities.
Prior to World War II,
you were either a young person
living at home,
going to school,
or when you were finished with school,
then you entered the workforce.
You were contributing
to the family income.
After World War II,
the middle class exploded.
Families could offer their kids
more leisure time,
more independence.
The rock and roll
teenage cowboy.
The American consumer economy
was booming and it just became
the American way of life:
spend money, buy things,
dress up, you know,
move up the food chain.
Gather 'round, kiddies.
Today I'm going to give you
a quick look-see
at what the well-dressed teenager is doing
in the way of fun and fashion.
If teenagers decided to work,
they could use that money
for their own benefit,
for their own leisure time.
They could buy their own cars.
They bought their own records.
They sort of helped create rock and roll.
Teenagers... they're terrific.
Jeans got sort of
irreparably linked
with cool.
And coolness became the ideal
to strive for.
Kay's
mother may have other opinions of style
of what looks best.
But of course mother has
old-fashioned ideas.
It's like, "What mom and dad want to do?
"Oh my God.
I can't even talk to them.
I do not want to wear
what they're wearing."
The adolescent is self-centered.
The charisma
of deviance is powerful.
Their sloppiness
is so deliberate as to be offensive.
So during the
1950s, denim becomes increasingly
associated with biker gangs
and juvenile delinquency.
There was a sort of fear,
I think, among adults that
if teenagers put on a pair of jeans,
they were automatically going
to become delinquents
in some way.
School systems
literally started banning blue jeans
because they identified
the kids who wore them
as the "bad seeds."
They were going to, you know,
beat up a little old lady
and steal her pocketbook or, or whatever.
The parents'
generation started to clamp down,
which caused a dip in sales.
Suddenly families were
shying away from buying blue jeans.
The denim
companies start to get worried.
As a result, a lot of the major companies
band together to form what
they called the Denim Council.
More people
than ever are wearing denim.
You'd have to look far and wide
to find an American of any age
who has never worn blue jeans.
So they start this
whole campaign first to try to counter
the "bad" blue jean look with
the "wholesome" blue jean look.
"This is the right way to wear jeans,"
and it's neat with a nice shirt
and this very kind of healthy-looking kid.
And then,
"This is the bad blue jean."
And so it's the more the kid
like with his hair hanging down, greasy,
and all that kind of stuff.
Like, see?
There is a difference.
You can be a good kid and wear blue jeans.
Denim
is really great for sports.
Looks like this joker
is knocking himself out
trying to prove it.
Folks wear jeans to get the work done
and jeans to relax in.
They tried
to create a National Denim Day.
They had all sorts of
campaigns around the country
which are all about
the discovery of America.
They are about cowboys,
they are about adventure,
and history.
Blue denim is
a symbol of our pioneering spirit.
It goes right back
to the beginning of America.
Men in blue denim opened up the old West,
and built our bridges and skyscrapers.
That series of advertisements
helped reverse the trend
away from blue jeans.
In the last few months
more applications for the
Peace Corps have come to us.
By the first years of the 1960s,
the Peace Corps, JFK's initiative
sending young Americans out
across the globe
to do good deeds,
they were actually dressed in blue jeans.
That was their uniform.
So no longer was it that
the bad kids were the only ones
wearing blue jeans.
One thing in particular
that's interesting about this period
is the denim companies
spend all this time in the 1950s
trying to get away from the rebel image
and then the 1960s happens.
Hippies
made a colorful scene with wild costumes,
uninhibited dancing,
and general high frolicking.
When we think about
the denim story in the 1960s,
we almost automatically think
of the hippies,
with their bellbottoms, and tie-dye,
but the hippies weren't the only
people wearing those clothes.
A man dies
when he refuses to stand up for justice.
A man dies when he refuses to take a stand
for that which is true.
So we're going to stand up right here.
The classic
image of the Civil Rights Movement
is Martin Luther King Jr.
And he and many of his closest partners
wore suits and button down shirts,
sort of a "Sunday best" approach.
We will be able to join hands
and sing in the words
of the old Negro spiritual,
free at last, free at last,
thank God Almighty we are free at last.
Being a man of African descent,
a lot hinged on his self-representation.
He needed to present himself to the world
as a respectable person,
because there was already
a notch against him
for being a Black man.
The focus on the Sunday best
has obscured the fact that
at that time there were
these young college students who say,
"Instead, we're going to wear
denim because we want to show
"that our political bonds
are to the Black working poor
and not to the Black bourgeois."
These young people, once they
left Howard University,
Fisk University,
Tougaloo College, to head south,
say, "We're going to wear
this denim alongside
"the working class and
sharecroppers who had been
"trying for decades
to fight for their right
to vote."
They were rebels with a cause.
For young Black
protesters, it absolutely is risky
with what they're wearing
because they already have
the systemic pressure
up against them presuming that they are
of a lower class or status in society.
And so wearing a certain style
of dress that is aligned
with the laboring class,
that is absolutely bold.
As this Southern
movement spreads and garners
national media attention,
you now have white students
who decide to go south
to help with the organizing.
So when those
white students go back north,
they go back wearing denim.
This becomes
the look of youth rebellion
in the 1960s.
They represent
a new form of social rebellion.
They dress in bizarre and colorful ways.
Hippies are very interesting...
The 1960s is a
pivotal point in the history of denim.
They are
hip, onto something good.
Just like for the
Civil Rights Movement,
for the hippies,
clothing was a form of political activism.
Of course it's a
whole different way of living,
it's a whole different way of thinking.
So many of the civilians have no concept.
But it's fun.
It's fun to be bizarre.
There was
such an emphasis with the counterculture
on creativity, on individuality,
self-expression.
People then
embellished their jeans.
They sewed fringe on them...
They put feathers.
They were
patched... - Painted...
Embroidered and shredded...
All of the sudden your jeans
were your canvases.
There was a cool factor.
And when rock stars and
musicians started wearing denim,
it became even cooler.
There was The Who, and Janis Joplin,
and the Doors, the Rolling
Stones, Led Zeppelin.
So then everyone wanted to wear them.
"Woodstock"... that movie
completely expanded our idea of fashion.
I know for me being this kid
in North Carolina,
when I saw that movie, I'm like,
"I want to
wear clothes like that."
Denim was
the uniform of that generation,
and a lot of the denim companies
started to capitalize on that.
It's interesting
to look at that case study of Levi's,
because in the 1950s
they tried so hard to get away
from the counterculture.
And then by 1971,
they use an aerial shot of the crowd
at a music festival
and just slap a Levi's logo
on it, and that's it!
It's been said
that "Those children of the '60s
came in as a tribe
and went out as a market."
They were the market for blue jeans.
By the time
you get into the early '70s,
hippie chic is everywhere.
The fashion
industry becomes wildly taken
with these young radicals.
You have designers with ads
that suggested that,
"The real freedom movement
is in your jeans."
It is ironic, isn't it?
Rewind like a decade earlier,
youth were sort of wearing denim
as a form of rebellion.
By the time we get to the 1970s,
like denim is being commodified.
The fashion industry co-opts
authentic subcultural styles
and then makes them part of the system.
Whether it seems dangerous
or seems totally trivial,
the fashion industry takes any
cool look or stance
and markets it if sees an audience for it.
We start to see
denim jeans become just a very
lucrative product.
They were really a great blank canvas
for designers to express themselves.
When I was 16 years old,
I was enamored with music and musicians,
and I couldn't play
so I couldn't be a musician,
but I wanted to look like a rock star.
So I opened a small shop
called People's Place
and started selling jeans.
At one point I was thinking,
"I think I could design
better jeans than we're buying
from vendors."
The fashion industry realizes
that there's this massive market
for all things denim.
Now it's sleek, high-rise, tight...
There becomes a certain kind of
glamor associated with jeans
for the first time.
It was a turning point,
which became the era of designer jeans.
There was Gloria Vanderbilt,
Calvin Klein...
There was
Halston... - Sasson...
- Fiorucci...
- Sergio Valente...
We were really trying to outdo
one another with sexiness.
But when Brooke Shields, as a young teen,
was the Calvin Klein poster
girl, I think heads turned.
You wanna know what comes
between me and my Calvins?
Nothing.
Calvin Klein Jeans.
Everyone said,
"Okay, well, this is going to
a whole new level."
It is like a tidal
wave over the whole industry.
People started actually
verbalizing what everyone
had known for a hundred years,
that blue jeans are sexy.
By the late '70s, designer jeans
were chipping away
at the fashion hierarchy.
They make it acceptable for anyone
to wear a pair of jeans
at any time or place.
Jeans undermine the idea
of what fashion was supposed to be.
They were part of a more general
democratization of fashion.
It suddenly became possible to wear jeans
in almost all settings.
In the late 1970s
around the Bronx in New York City,
we start to see hip hop emerge.
And denim jeans become this
sort of a uniform.
For African Americans,
a pair of designer jeans
came with a lot of value.
That's why we get language
coming straight out of hip hop,
like "fresh," "dope," "fly."
You know, because that spoke
to the value of clothing.
Hip hop changed
denim in a very big way.
The hip hop stars started going
on tour and doing MTV videos
wearing really cool clothes.
The way in which it was worn
was very different.
In the early '80s,
with bands like Run DMC,
it's just more of a straight look,
but then it becomes more baggy.
And then they started
to wear brands like Ralph Lauren,
and Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger.
Those brands represented a lifestyle that
historically African Americans
had been excluded from.
I want to thank Snoop Doggy Dog
and everybody on the show.
So wonderful...
I mean when we
think about those brands,
we think about the country club
or yachting.
By putting a brand like
Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger
on their backs,
they were changing the meaning
of the brand.
This brand that's associated
with all-American identity
or whiteness becomes associated
with like hip hop culture.
Not only do we
see hip hop artists able to remix
sounds, and, you know,
like in music, but they're also
able to take clothing
and remix it for their own means.
To get your hands
on that clothing and wear it
is subversive in a way.
Because it is saying, "I'm not
supposed to be wearing this,
but look at me, I am."
Hip hop really helped to take command
of the denim narrative.
Bring it!
K7 and the Swing Kids!
Peace!
Jeans are probably
the single most iconic garment
of the 20th century.
Each generation
keeps rediscovering how jeans
can be meaningful for them.
Blue jeans are an amazing thing
for anyone trying to tell
a broader history of the United States.
It allows you to talk about slavery.
It allows you to talk about
fashion and consumerism.
It allows you to talk about cool
and the invention of cool.
And to have all of these things
under the same heading
is really quite remarkable.
Denim and its
history is a perfect metaphor
for where we find ourselves
as a culture right now.
Becoming much more aware of the silences,
of those groups
that have been pushed to the side.
Exposing and celebrating
these narratives that haven't made it into
that typical telling of jeans
is part of the work to change
our understanding
of American history.
It's a long
journey from "Negro cloth"
to hip hop denim and baggy jeans
ruling the denim market
in the 1990s.
As I sit here in a denim jacket,
you know, it's clear to me that
we can see the rich tapestry
of where we've been as a people,
as a nation.
The thing about the denim jean
is it tells a story about who we are.
It's a garment that's almost
like keeping the fingerprints
of our history...
the creases, the tears, all of it.
You know, you can repair it all you want,
mend it all you want,
but the scars of that, you know,
the memory, that material memory
will remain there.