Denim in the White House? President Carter made it so

In the 1970s, jeans weren't considered presidential. Former president Gerald Ford, a square-jawed Republican, wore stocky suits, and while it's possible that Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy wore denim in the Oval Office, there is no record of them in Levi's as they held the nation's highest office.

- JACOB GALLAGHER

Then came president Jimmy Carter.

"Jeans are an authentic part of Carter's character," The New York Times wrote of Carter's clothes in 1976, just as he was about to be elected president, completing the unlikely journey from his roots as a Georgia peanut farmer. Jeans never stopped being part of Carter's character. Up to the end of his life, work shirts and blue jeans were staples of Carter's uniform, especially as he spent some of his post-presidency building homes with Habitat for Humanity.

Carter, the 39th president of the United States who died Sunday, would prove to be an Oval Office trendsetter. Nearly all the presidents who followed him were captured wearing jeans while in office. Ronald Reagan, who walloped Carter at the polls, sealing the peanut farmer's fate as a one-term president, was a double-denim fashion plate. Later, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all wore washed denim in office (although Obama was plagued by accusations that his looked more akin to "dad jeans").

Carter could be credited with shepherding jeans to the political stage as a uniform — or, possibly, a costume — of all-American, hardworking humility. There is a direct throughline from Carter's blue-jeaned modesty to politicians such as Marco Rubio and Pete Buttigieg stumping in jeans as a signal that they're different from those cloistered suits in Washington.