Author: Ben Tuthill
One-hundred and forty years ago last week Levi Strauss & Co. put out its first pair of riveted denim work pants and somehow violently ruptured the American fashion psyche for all eternity. The first Levi’s were overalls made for Northern California gold miners. Over the next 80 years they were made into pants, simplified and slimmed down, culminating in the now famous 1947 501 style that you are more likely than not wearing right at this very moment.
Have you ever looked at a pair of jeans? They’re stiff, they’re rough, they make your legs kind of hot when its hot out but kind of cold when its cold out, they’re generally unflattering and they’re blue. The central garment of American existence is extremely uncomfortable, and extremely blue. What kind of racket did we buy into here?
If you ask the average American what he’s most comfortable wearing, he’ll probably say his favorite pair of jeans. The average American is insane.
Somehow Levi’s tricked us into thinking that they made a good product. They convinced us that something that worked well for goldmining would also work well for doing the dishes, or walking the dog, or going to the club. I don’t know if it’s good advertising or something weird about the American blue-collar underdog complex. Do we all just wish we were goldminers too? Because goldminers are kind of awesome? Or do we just think they had extraordinarily practical taste in pants?
For a long time jeans were made well. Levi’s used American-made denim made on shuttle looms that made fortified, selvedge fabric. The rivets actually did something; the denim was thick and unwashed.
The 1970s destroyed everything good about denim. Consumer demand for denim rose, quality declined, selvedge died out and production moved overseas. Jeans became a useless shadow of their former selves. A pair of $50 Levi’s from Urban Outfitters would last a hardworking California prospector about a week.
Based on recent statistics, the average modern American spends approximately zero hours a year prospecting. For a long time we were perfectly happy wearing jeans that had been washed and sandblasted into complete submission, complete with cheap seams, ornamental rivets, and extensively branded back pockets. But then in the mid 2000s, in one of the darkest corners of the internet, a sect of arch-conservative, ultra-traditionalist hardliners rose up in the darkest corners of menswear forums. They were called denimheads.
Denimheads don’t particularly care about fashion. They have no regard for conventional economics or normative taste. They don’t share a political agenda and they don’t maintain any sort of wholesome system of morality or general good values. They are almost universally not prospectors. Less than 1% of them have ever performed an act of manual labor. They only care about one thing: high quality, raw, selvedge denim.
Denimheads are a radical sect of the American Heritage movement. They’re deeply imbued with a historical fashion conscious, but they focus all of their energy on the history of blue jeans. They can identify the make and model of pair of jeans with just a glance and can immediately place it within a historical denim perspective somewhere between the 1947 ur-501 and the most advanced Japanese denim of the present.
They don’t really dress well, but they are willing to spend over $500 on a single pair of jeans. Those jeans don’t necessarily look good, but they’re made of the finest raw Japanese selvedge, and every single seam will be fortified.
They will wear the same pair of jeans every day without washing them in order to properly “break them in.” The jeans not only reflect all of American history, but also a long personal history in which every crease, every whisker, every wallet-line will become a permanent memory forever faded into indigo.
If you ask a denimhead about his jeans he will show you the selvedge seams, discuss the advantages of his particular fabric weight, show off the honey-combs that he made himself on the back of his knees, and tell you with pride how long it’s been since he washed them.
Who are these people? Why are they the way they are? What is it about denim that has so captivated the American people? I had to know. I had to understand. But there was only one way: I had to become a denimhead myself.
(part 1 of a 3 part series)
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