Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria who landed in San Francisco, is credited with being the first manufacturer of modern jeans. In 1873, with a tailor, he filed a patent for a denim pant with “rivets sewn in at the points of strain” — the pockets, crotch, and hip. The goal was to make pants you could wear for years — on horseback and into gold mines or, less romantically, for any sort of manual labor — without ripping them.
Jeans remained working clothes worn by factory hands until around the beginning of World War II, when the uniform was reinvented as an image. When director John Ford put John Wayne in jeans in the 1939 movie Stagecoach, it was to symbolize not drudgery, but freedom through hardship — and the kind of manliness that was supposed to have flourished there in the absence of women. (In the 1870s there were 100 men for every 38 women in California, and the gender ratio would not reach parity until 1950.)
Already in the 1880s, Walt Whitman made fun of the “down-town clerks” he saw flooding in and out of the office buildings of lower Manhattan. They were “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest.” Their clothes were especially embarrassing. They looked “trig and prim in great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts … tight pantaloons, straps, which seem coming into little fashion again, startling cravats, and hair all soaked and slickery with sickening oils.”
As Western wear, jeans represented a rejection of this white-collar emasculation. Levi’s promised that America was still a place where you could get by on your wits and that if you took risks you could turn dirt to gold. Lady Luck might favor anyone on the frontier — any white man, that is. If jeans were the sartorial symbol of equal opportunity, the democratized work wear of self-made men, racism always tainted their American dream of transcending class. Nineteenth-century satirists mocked the Chinese laborers who came to San Francisco for wearing black pajamas. The Apaches that John Wayne kills sport leather chaps.
Fashions changed, but the idea that white-collar work made men effeminate persisted. In the 1950s and 1960s, a growing literature on male malaise — from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Revolutionary Road — attested that the kind of bootlicking required to hold down a salaried job was the opposite of independence. You put up with these humiliations only in order to support your wife and kids. Wearing jeans would never fly with a white-collar boss. A man in jeans thus revolted against domesticity and its demands. On Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis, jeans became that paradoxical thing: a uniform of rebellion. As fetishized consumer goods, they became part of the consumer economy — traditionally the domain of housewives and households — even as they symbolized the desire to escape it.
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Moira Weigel, Pajama Rich
In the 1950s and 1960s, a growing literature on male malaise — from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to Revolutionary Road — attested that the kind of bootlicking required to hold down a salaried job was the opposite of independence. You put up with these humiliations only in order to support your wife and kids. Wearing jeans would never fly with a white-collar boss. A man in jeans thus revolted against domesticity and its demands. On Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis, jeans became that paradoxical thing: a uniform of rebellion.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/149395745182
