Good JEANS

Despite its heralded demise at the start of the pandemic, denim was everywhere on the fall runways, offered in a wide range of silhouettes and luxurious fabrications.

- ALISON S.COHN

Blue denims are the most beautiful things since the gondola," the inimitable Diana Vreeland once decreed. And perhaps no article of clothing is as quintessentially American and, like America itself, as endlessly capable of reinvention as the blue jean. Patented in San Francisco in 1873 by two immigrants, tailor Jacob Davis and dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss, sturdy denim pants woven from indigo-dyed cotton and reinforced with metal rivets were first worn by miners and other laborers. They would become synonymous with Hollywood's romance with the cowboy, and by the early 1940s they were popular as women's leisurewear, thanks to silver-screen stars like Ginger Rogers and Rita Hayworth, who wore them in publicity photos. A symbol for 1950s teen angst in Rebel Without a Cause, they were adopted by the 1960s counterculture. Then, in 1976, Calvin Klein became the first designer to show jeans on the catwalk, ushering in an era of pop-cultural fixation that reached its apex (or perhaps its saturation point) when Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake wore matching denim-on-denim looks on the red carpet at the American Music Awards in 2001.

One of the most popular pandemic predictions was that people would abandon denim, as fashion observers and shoppers gravitated toward the softer feel and more forgiving waistlines of sweatpants. But rather than disappearing, jeans are once again a fashion phenomenon. Hallowed European houses from Alaïa to Bottega Veneta to Celine used them as a blank slate for innovation and experimentation. Similarly, in his debut at denim stalwart Diesel, Y/Project's Glenn Martens showed a tour de force of research and development, featuring jeans that had been chromed, quilted, frayed at the waist, or tufted to look like fur.