Quezi

Jeans - photo by Violentz - CC-BY

Geane or Gene was once the English name for Genoa, Italy, which was known for producing a particular kind of cloth. Similar everyday fabric woven in 16th century England was named after it; at first called ‘Gene fustian’, but soon known simply as geanes or jean. (Spelling was still very variable!)

In 19th century America jean or jeans was valued as a sturdy, economical choice for pants and overalls, and was produced in great quantity by the growing textile industry. Here it was a cotton twilled cloth, though once it had contained linen. It was usually coloured in the US, while in England white jean was popular with men travelling to hot parts of the British Empire. Advice manuals on equipping yourself for life in India told you to replace your woollen suits with white jean trousers, waistcoats and jackets.

American jeans was generally blue or brown. “Jeans pants” were popular for working men and soldiers. Some of the cloth was called “Kentucky jeans”, some was used to dress the Confederate army, and Mark Twain described some characters in rural Tennessee as “dressed in homespun “jeans,” blue or yellow  – there were no other varieties of it”. By coincidence he published this in the same year, 1873, that Levi Strauss was patenting the idea of adding rivets to jeans – except that Levi’s weren’t made of jeans at all, but of denim.

Denim was another tough, workaday cloth, but with a little more flexibility than jeans. It had enough “drape” to be used for soft furnishings. Levi’s customers are said to have preferred blue denim to a stiffer brown fabric he also tried out, and the rest is history.

It seems that the name “jeans” was so strongly associated with pants and trousers that it evolved from a fabric name into the name of a garment. The word “denim” has been through a similar series of changes. Like jeans it started as a place-name “branding” a type of fabric. In this case it was the city of Nîmes in France giving its name to “serge de Nimes”, later “serge denims”, originally a woollen cloth. If you think patterned denim was a 20th century idea, as I did, you may like to know that in 1703 the London Gazette mentioned a “pair of Flower’d Serge de Nim Breeches”.

In cotton-rich America denim lost any association with wool. And now of course, like jeans, it is being used as a garment name.  Are you wearing your denims today?