Strange things have happened to bluejeans, it seems.
They were supposed to be practical; then they were fashionable. They were supposed to be cheap; then they weren’t. They were supposed to be a niche item; then they were everywhere (shown here).
That left filmmaker Anna Lee Strachan with a logical question: “Why is everyone in the world walking around in the same pair of pants?”
So she created “Riveted: The History of Jeans,” which debuts at 9 p.m. Monday (Feb. 7), to open PBS’ “American Experience” season. It tells of changes that kept surprising people.
One jolt came in 1999, fashion historian Emma McClendon told the Television Critics Association, when Tom Ford priced a pair at $2,800. “But what shocked everybody even more is that the jeans sold out.”
This was the exact opposite of the birth of bluejeans.
At first, people just wore them because they had to. Denim jeans were worn by slaves, laborers, cowboys, farmers – people who did tough work and needed something to last forever. But then …
Tanisha Ford, now a history professor at City University of New York, recalls when she was working on her dissertation. “I came across a photograph of two sisters” in the Mississippi civil-rights struggle. “They were wearing denim overalls at the march in Washington. And it blew my mind.”
Most images of the march, she said, had “people dressed in their Sunday best.” But now protestors were deliberately wearing the same type of pants their ancestors had during slavery.
She eventually traced a “long history of jeans as a symbol of racial protests within Black communities, from the early civil rights movement through the hip hop generation.”
There was another side, she said. Entering the workplace after getting her master’s degree in 2005, she was suddenly paying from $120 to $200 for a single pair. Other Black women were also buying such jeans “because they were a sign that we were fulfilling our elders’ dreams of professionalism.”
Along the way, strange things were happening to jeans. They ranged from skinny legs to bell-bottoms. They were ripped (usually by machine in a calculated pattern, McClendon said) and faded.
Still, some things remain unchanged, including this: Bluejeans usually remain blue.
That began simply because indigo dye was so readily available. Denim could be any color now, but blue remains dominant. “Humans really seem to like blue,” Strachan said. “The other reason may be that blue is really good at hiding dirt.”
Then again, some of these people never get near dirt. They wouldn’t want their denim to get dirty, their ripped jeans to get ripped.