Hello Paper Dolls!
We put some awesome vintage denim pieces we put into the windows and wanted to give you some history about America's favorite fashion item: jeans.
In 1853 Bavarian immigrant and entrepreneur Levi Strauss cashes in on the Gold Rush by moving from San Francisco to found a wholesale dry goods business, Levi Strauss & Co. He didn’t mine for gold—directly. The Gold Rush was at its peak. Men were going west in search of fortune and would spend months camping out in often inhospitable climates; pants made out of traditional fabric would be destroyed within a matter of weeks. Latvian émigré and tailor Jacob Davis and his fabric supplier, Strauss, patent and manufacture the “XX” pants, later dubbed the 501. The U.S. government grants the pair U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for rivet-reinforced pants under the heading, “IMPROVEMENT IN FASTENING POCKET-OPENINGS.”
Henry David Lee was another kind of merchant. He started out in Ohio selling kerosene and moved west to Salina, Kansas, with a small bundle of venture capital. The H. D. Lee Mercantile Company sold fancy canned goods and offered
a line of Eastern work clothes. In the 1920's, about the time Lee was introducing the first zipper fly, Levi Strauss was deleting the crotch rivet.
In 1930, Vogue magazine ran an advertisement depicting two society women in tight fitting jeans, a look that they called “Western chic.” By the mid-1930's, department stores were stocking Levis jeans and western boots in the women’s section. In the 1940's U.S. soldiers and sailors serving overseas act as inadvertent ambassadors for jeans, introducing them as casual wear around the globe.
James Dean popularized blue jeans in the movie Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. He wore a T-shirt, a leather jacket, and jeans, a uniform men began copying immediately. Since people didn’t have access to the internet or even television in many cases, movies and the actors in them held sway over the public imagination even more than they do now. Moreover, Rebel Without a Cause was a film where the clothing stood out. While it was originally supposed to be a black and white picture, the studio decided to make the film in color; Dean’s Lee 101 Riders were dip-dyed to make the blue especially eye-catching.
In the 1960's, blue jeans were rare among adults and had not as yet been accepted in conventional places such as schools, restaurants, theaters, and offices. There have been a number of notable jeans styles since the 1960's such as bell-bottom jeans, baggy jeans, distressed looking jeans, skin-tight jeans, and low-rise and peek-a-boo jeans, to name a few.
In 1970, Calvin Klein promoted his designer jeans as refined sportswear. In the 1980's, designers such as Gloria Vanderbilt, Ralph Lauren, and Jean-Paul Gaultier marketed their brands. Guess Inc., Jordache, and others would also cash in on the designer jeans boom. Some designer jeans could be quite fanciful. For instance, in the late 1990's, the Milanese house of Gucci presented feather-trim and feather embroidered jeans.
Come down to Paper Doll Vintage and check out our amazing vintage denim collection and denim inspired windows!
Sources:
http://www.fashionintime.org
http://goodhoodstore.com
Motherearthnews.com
Fortune.com
Racked.com
