Did I say ‘the jeans century’? It’s actually been a while longer than that – jeans have been around in one form or another since the mid-nineteenth century. But they’ve only been part of the everyday wardrobe of everyone for about the last sixty years. If the twentieth century gave us many things, one of the best things was jeans. Much more useful than walking on the moon…!
And the strange thing about jeans is that they have never been out of fashion. They may change shape, style, colour and weight, but there’s always been a pair in most people’s clothes collection. I currently have about four pairs, with an extra ‘old’ pair covered in rips that I can’t bear to throw into the garbage.
There have been many strange forms of denim along the way. There was the stonewash look, favoured through much of the 80s, that made the jeans look worn even when new. Then there were some slightly more bizarre types of jeans – pinstripe jeans (remember them?), and who could forget sno-wash jeans – like stone wash except with darker dark bits and lighter light bits. Fashionable for about a month in 1985 and dead ever since.
Denim is still going strong even though we are already in the second decade of the 21st century. Where did all that time go…?
These days there are many more styles of jeans on the go at once than in previous decades. There’s the lo-slung workwear style Nu-Metal jeans, then there’s the skinny jeans as favoured by the hip kids (and the very thin), then you also have your classic no-nonsense styles of course, sometimes with slight changes to the style such as 360 degree seams, built in ‘distress’ (rips, folds, even mock dirt have been used to jazz the jeans up), and things like patchwork where old beer towels or other fabric are incorporated alongside the denim.
It’s pretty much do as you please in the current fashion climate, and this is a good thing – it means you can pick jeans that suit your style and take it from there, rather than being dioctated to by the arbiters of style. Just a couple of pointers though if you’re in the market for a new pair of denims: high waists are still out, and don’t even think about sno-wash. Or flares.
Other than that – just about anything goes.
T Schevchenko writes about travel, culture and the environment across a number of media both online and in print. Have a look at more jeans: http://www.peacocks.co.uk/category/index.jsp?categoryId=3889119
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=T_Schevchenko
http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Jeans-Century&id=4613201