Blue Jeans | Fabric of Freedom
Blue Jean History is Goldrush Rich
What goes into a pair of good jeans? Denim, of course, and a lot of history as well. Serena Altschu delves into blue-jean history.
She interviews Michael Allen Harris, a denim detective. Harris is a painter by trade. But he loves digging in mines to find American history left behind in the way of denim discards. Miners left these blue jean articles behind, not realizing that decades later these artifacts would sell for thousands, tens of thousands, and more. Harris finds these treasures and rescues them from further decay.
Altschu also interviews Lynn Downey, a Levi Strauss historian. Downey further explains the blue jean treasure trove that Harris has brought to the surface.
Altschu introduces us to Roy Denim. Roy Slaper built a one-man shop. He’s the ultimate entrepreneur. He wears all hats of the operation. Yet that does not equate to master of none. His high-quality jeans sell for $300 or so…each. The man works on the machines, works on the business, and gives consumers a quality product for a hefty price. Slaper is passionate about his business and product. He proves that an entrepreneur can indeed do all things in a business and do them with care.
Then Altschu interviews another pair of passionate entrepreneurs: Matt and Carrie Edmondson. They discuss the special-care that blue jeans deserve. Interestingly, this special care is based on what miners and others of the Old West did. They did not wash their jeans because of the lack of modern conveniences that we now take for granted: indoor plumbing and washing machines. That special care preserved the jeans in a way that our impulsive-ways of washing jeans after every use destroys.
Michael Allen Harris
I see dimples in the river.
Serena Altschu
OK, in the intricately woven world of denim, this man, Michael Allen Harris, a commercial painter from Orange County, California, is sort of a celebrity.
Michael Allen Harris
You can’t research this stuff on the web. And nobody knows anything about it. So it’s like a real mystery. You know. It’s like being a detective, a Denim Detective.
Serena Altschu
On weekends, he hunts old mines in search of blue gold: old jeans, really old jeans, the jeans of the old West, dirty, dusty, tattered jeans that can appraise for up to 100,000 dollars.
Michael Allen Harris
This pair of jeans was from about 1873-1874 when the rivets on the top right here were unstamped. They’re stamped only on the back.
Serena Altschu
Oh, my goodness. Harris found this jacket, one of the oldest denim jackets known to exist, which Lynn Downey, the historian at Levi Strauss, showed us.
Lynn Downey
This has its previous life permanently imprinted on it. Our designers are the biggest users of the historical collections here. There’s such understanding, there’s such respect, and such love for this.
Serena Altschu
Downey says that these antique jeans are prized by designers because of their wear patterns. Today, those patterns are recreated by jean designers, like Lauren Cronk, for that all-important lived-in look.
Lynn Downey
If you look at the way an old pair of jeans has been worn away or torn, it’s sometimes easy to surmise what kind of early life it had. If there are really significant wrinkles on the back of the knee, for example, you can tell that the person either spent a lot of time on a horse or did some sort of job where he was bending his knees a lot.
Serena Altschu
Cowboys wore them. So did bikers like the one Marlon Brando played in the Wild One. “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” “What do you got?”
As did the demonstrators that brought down the Berlin Wall. No other garment personifies freedom more than denim blue jeans. But jeans were originally workwear. They were the essential clothing of a hard day in the mines when Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss patented the idea to use a metal rivet to hold denim together.
And those jeans were made in America, like the rigid fabric from which they were cut. That is until the 1990s when companies like Levi’s began to shut down most of their American manufacturing.
American
I mean, it’s not only Levi’s, it’s everybody.
Serena Altschu
So you might say they don’t make jeans like that anymore. That is until you meet Roy Slaper.
Roy Slaper
I like the idea of a whole factory. You know. A whole factory of old machines. I’m the mechanic, one-man, and I’m the head designer. Roy Slaper designs and manufactures his jeans right here in America.
Serena Altschu
He is, in fact, a one-man sweatshop. Slaper uses 14 different machines to make a single pair of jeans. Now, that’s dedication.
Roy Slaper
It doesn’t feel like this wispy little piece of something. It feels like quality.
Serena Altschu
Carefully, he designs and makes each garment out of this one-room workshop in Oakland, California.
Roy Slaper
This is a big deal for me because this is my denim.
Serena Altschu
Slapper even designed the denim of the jeans. And he had that denim custom made at one of the world’s oldest continuously operating denim mills: Cone Mills Corporation (White Oak Plant) in Greensboro, North Carolina. The fabric is woven on looms over 50 years old–the looms are over 50 years old, not the denim–using a process that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.
His jeans are not only made the old-fashioned way, in fact, but they are also designed to actually look better as they age right down to the buttons.
Roy Slaper
When they wear out, the buttons become a kind of coppery, brassy color. Basically, everything on the jean is made so that as it wears, it looks more beautiful than when it’s new. The consumer–the jean wearer becomes the artist of his or her own pair of jeans. As the person goes about the day, wear patterns become etched into the fabric. The wear patterns are unique to that activity and the body doing that activity.
Serena Altschu
The cost for all this scrupulous attention to detail, a tidy $340. You see, in the venerable world of jeans, what’s old is new again, except a little more expensive.
Like jeans designed by Matt and Carrie Edmondson in Nashville, Tennessee.
Edmondson (Matt and Carrie)
“Matt and I both were always very in tune with this fabric.”
Serena Altschu
Their company is named after their grandparents, Imogene and Willie. Of course, jeans like these require special care.
Edmondson
We encourage, mainly due to a small amount of shrinkage, to not wash your jeans for six months. Wow. Can you imagine not washing your jeans for 26 weeks?
Serena Altschu
Believe it or not, others are even more particular about the care of their jeans.
Edmondson
I think the extreme is to never wash your jeans. This sort of comes from the school that as miners and people wore their jeans, the Indigo left the fabric and caused these amazing wear patterns to sort of evolve into the jean.
Michael Allen Harris
See, this is what you get when you don’t wash. You know. Who knows if this was ever washed? These creases are so strong that they’re actually breaking through here.
Lynn Downey
Oh, I can’t think of any other piece of clothing that elicits the kind of emotional response and memory that blue jeans do. Your touching your own history every day. You’re wearing your own history every day.
Serena Altschu
These jeans may be torn, but woven in them is an American history of work and play. The wear and tear of vintage jeans are unique to each pair. The wear patterns suggest much about how the persona wearing them lived his or her life.
