In the 1950s, Levi Strauss & Co. decided to update the image of its denim clothes. Until then, the company had been depending for sales on the romantic appeal of the Gold Rush and the rugged image of the cowboy. Hell, it was still calling its signature pants, the ones with the copper rivets, “waist overalls.” It didn’t want to abandon the evocative Gold Rush connection, but the postwar world was filling with consumption-minded creatures called “teenagers,” and it seemed time to rethink the company’s pitch.
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The Politics of Pants
It was consumers, not marketers, that made jeans a symbol of youthful revolt.
The rest of Sullivan’s book is addressed to the culture, the fashion, and of course the business of jeans. The last of these threads is the most valuable, since it is probably the least known and the most revealing. Who knew, for example, that leisure suits were introduced by Lee? (And what does that episode say about the marketers’ conception, let alone control, of a product’s meaning?) Sullivan’s book is as comprehensive on its subject as you are likely to want, if not more so. Jeans and Jack Kerouac. Jeans and the dude ranch. Jeans and the advent of the zipper. Jeans and punk. Jeans and disco. Jeans and the indigo trade. Thousand-dollar Jeans. Collectible jeans. Even pants (not jeans) and Brigham Young, who in 1830 charged that trousers with buttons in front were “fornication pants.”
There’s even jeans and the color blue. Sullivan has penned an ode to blueness that goes on for four pages. (“The deeper blue becomes,” he quotes the artist Wassily Kandinsky as saying, “the more urgently it summons man toward the infinite.”) Best of all, though, is jeans and Vladimir Nabokov, despite the fact that Nabokov has nothing much to say about jeans.
Sullivan uses Nabokov inventively, quoting from his 1955 novel Lolita to demonstrate how the narrator’s “refined” sensibility is transformed by a whole world of low-end culture that has become—for him—eroticized. The novel’s motels and shopping strips, writes Sullivan, “are the consummate low-culture backdrops for Lolita’s jeans, sneakers, and lollipops.” It’s not just Lolita that Nabokov’s intellectual narrator has fallen for. And if you don’t see what eroticized low-end culture has to do with the triumph of American jeans, then Elvis really has left the building, and you’ve gone with him.
Charles Paul Freund is a Reason contributing editor.
There’s even jeans and the color blue. Sullivan has penned an ode to blueness that goes on for four pages. (“The deeper blue becomes,” he quotes the artist Wassily Kandinsky as saying, “the more urgently it summons man toward the infinite.”) Best of all, though, is jeans and Vladimir Nabokov, despite the fact that Nabokov has nothing much to say about jeans.
Sullivan uses Nabokov inventively, quoting from his 1955 novel Lolita to demonstrate how the narrator’s “refined” sensibility is transformed by a whole world of low-end culture that has become—for him—eroticized. The novel’s motels and shopping strips, writes Sullivan, “are the consummate low-culture backdrops for Lolita’s jeans, sneakers, and lollipops.” It’s not just Lolita that Nabokov’s intellectual narrator has fallen for. And if you don’t see what eroticized low-end culture has to do with the triumph of American jeans, then Elvis really has left the building, and you’ve gone with him.
Charles Paul Freund is a Reason contributing editor.