Top 5 World Affairs x Fashion Moments: May 13, 2024

It’s Day 18 of my Spring Challenge (yay,the Spring Challenge is now an adult)!

As a reminder, this challenge means that either you get an email in your inbox 5 times per week until May 31st (which means I get a set of luxurious, vintage jammies) OR I have to donate $5 to a charity I hate for every week that I miss the goal.

In very fun news, I just discovered that my emails have been going out with an old subject sigh - the disadvantages of publishing in short bursts. But no worries! It’s all fixed now.

So, for all of you out there who have been clicking on the new emails because they promise to talk about fashion reads - I’m sorry! But I hope the other series are as interesting to you :)

Series #3: Top 5 World Affairs x Fashion Moments

Today’s pick: Denim x The Civil Rights Movement

Full confession: I don’t really wear jeans, even though I own a few old pairs from 8-10 years ago. Makes me relieved that my dad never gave in to my begging for a pair of ripped jeans in middle school.

But regardless of my personal wardrobe, jeans have been a youth symbol for generations. Coming from the French town of Nîmes, hence the name De Nîmes, the tough material was a great choice for those who did physical labor, like merchant seamen and dockworkers.

But Simran, you say, I don’t do physical labor. Why do I wear jeans?

Jeans, Hollywood, and the March on Washington

In WWII, American servicemen often wore jeans when stationed abroad. This and the portrayal of rebellious cowboys in Westerns in jeans gave rise to jeans being viewed as quintessentially American.

In the 1950s, Marlon Brando and James Dean popularized jeans as a symbol of anti-authority rebellion and as a cool, bad-boy look. This opened the doors to jeans being considered at least part of the mainstream and showed that jeans actually stood for something.

Now: I want you to take a look at the two paragraphs above - what’s the common thread running through jeans-wearing here? That’s right. Rebellion.

And then the Civil Rights Movement leaned into that idea still further.

We usually see pictures of Civil Rights protestors dressed in their Sunday best. This meant suits and dresses, as the media criticized everything protestors did. So they figured, why give the media more to write about?

However, as time went on, this strategy began to change.

Jeans: Strategy and Practicality

The majority of protestors who lived in the American South worked as sharecroppers or manual laborers, who wore, you guessed it - jeans. It was impractical for them to own formal clothes and it also made it hard for them to relate to the collegiate formal-wearing canvassers who landed at their doorsteps, encouraging them to vote.

So what did these canvassers do? Yep, they ditched the Sunday best for jeans.

The protestors quickly realized the political and strategic importance of jeans. Protesting, even sit-in protests, is hard work. It requires hours of walking and holding up signs, for which Sunday clothes are unsuited. Bonus: both men and women could wear them - points for gender equality, another area of protest in the 1960s.

Plus, jeans made a pointed statement. Clothes for slaves, back before the Civil War, were often made from denim, both for durability and to contrast them against the linen-wearing white plantation owners.

Denim in 1965 emphasized that little had changed in the hundred years since the end of the Civil War for black people (fear of the KKK meant that in Mississippi, less than 7% of the eligible black population was on the voters’ list. In other rural counties, there were none).

The 1960s were a hotbed for protests, as we all know. People rose to dissent against the Vietnam War, environmental abuse, gender inequality, and racial inequality, as well as to fight for gay rights and student rights.

This meant that the uniform of one group of protestors spread quickly to the next group, especially as most people were fighting for various causes.

Clothing brands quickly began producing more denim, marketing it both to the protestors and the general public. Soon, jeans began to go mainstream, with even Ronald Reagan photographed wearing them on visits to his California ranch - a symbol of his rugged individualism.

Jeans and Politics Today

It’s easy to think jeans hold no meaning today, that they’re so ubiquitous that nobody thinks about them. But that’s not quite true.

In 2021, North Korea banned skinny jeans as symbols of a “capitalistic lifestyle”. Women in India continue to protest against politicians policing their jeans by posting pictures of themselves in ripped jeans.

Even brands have a role to play. Data shows that Levi’s, a business known for its stances on immigration and gun control, is more popular with Democrats, while Wrangler’s, a company that denies any political affiliation, has a larger Republican base.

Puts a whole new context on the whole skinny vs straight jean debate, doesn’t it?

Note: This series does not aim to give a comprehensive view of any one garment and its history, only an overview.

However, if there’s interest, I’m happy to write out a whole series just based on one garment (whether it’s Regency muslin dresses, jeans, or something else). So email me and let me know!

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xoxo,

Simran