By Joan Juliet Buck
Image Curation Nikki Igol at Library180
Perceived wisdom: what’s hard is strong, what’s soft is weak, what’s hard protects but does not comfort, what’s soft comforts but does not protect.
Denim is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with a story arc that goes from male to female. It begins as an impenetrable armor, and after the passage of time — purists would say, after the passage of the right kind of time in the right kind of way — it becomes a security blanket.
The one true denim goes from dark raw selvedge hard as steel to pale rags soft as silk. Blue jeans begin their life cycle as rigid cotton armor with stiff side seams and shiny metal rivets, and age to faded softness that loves the body.
Denim is as hard as irreversible opinions and cherished beliefs, denim is the casing of certainty that allows you to proceed with your eyes closed, denim needs a lot of age and experience before it will bend. In that, denim is almost human.
Lee Riders Jeans Ad, 1972. Above: Pat Cleveland, 1983. Photo by Rose Hartman/Getty Images.
Jeans look best when they don’t hug curves or newly excavated Wegovy hip bones, but hang a little distracted, as if they had no business being there at all. A few rips are seductive in the manner of a split banana skin, a burst peach exposing soft flflesh; too much soft flflesh revealed and you think of food waste, flflies and rot.
Denim is thick as canvas and invites decoration; but instead of patches and fringe, this century has slashed and shredded the fronts of the thighs in a frenzy of desecration that suggests violent outbursts of self-hatred abetted by the clawing of twenty enraged cats, which leave the quad muscles naked to the world behind dramatically rent, torn, ripped, slashed, shredded fabric gaping behind white threads, like open wounds edged with torn sutures. As if the jeans were the Dorian Gray portraits of their owners, or their Edvard Munch screams. For the last twenty years, jeans have been manufactured pre-ripped, pre-torn. I want to laugh and scream when a pair walks by.
Rips aside, the male-female principle keeps your mind on denim as fifight and/or surrender, male and/or female, tension and/or release, Yang, Yin.
The real alchemy takes place in real denim, not the adulterated stretch spray-on polyester spandex Lycra impostor that birthed such grotesques as jeggings and workout jeans, and is — in all its monstrous variations — the equivalent of a plant-animal hybrid, a GMO mule, a lookalike that will soon exhaust itself in contact with real skin, and have to be sent out of sight to a landfill, where it will do no good.
But both real denim and adulterated denim share the one attribute that’s been its handle since the beginning: sincerity. The impossible truth about denim is that, as in the case of some corrupt churches, sincerity can survive without authenticity. Even spandex denim is sincere.
Levi’s 501 Jeans Ad. The Face, January 1993.
“Denim is a pickup truck and a smoker’s cough, not a Prius and Nicorettes.”
Whether it’s 100% cotton and so hard it cracks when you bend it, or elastically eager to mold to your flesh, denim speaks. Its vocabulary may be limited, but its voice is loud. It speaks for the people and from the heart. It may not always be what it looks like, but it always believes it is right and true and good.
Denim’s sincerity forces you to match its purity.
Cher. Beverly Hills, California, 1970. Photo by Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
For the 150 years that jeans have existed, and the 80 years they have dominated the cultural and commercial imagination, they have signified toil in the fields, freedom on the range, ownership of longhorns, rustling of steer and wrangling of bulls. I give you confident cowboys, squinty-eyed outlaws, misunderstood youths, motorbike renegades: jeans are there to proclaim individuality and some degree of badness.
Denim is a pickup truck and a smoker’s cough, not a Prius and Nicorettes.
Denim demands that you be real.
This was difficult for someone who was a teenage French Lycée Mod in Swinging London, where authenticity wasn’t on the style repertoire. I could do shocking miniskirt, kinetic patterns and too much white makeup, 1914 velvet dress, 1920s flapper beaded shift or 1930s crepe de chine, 1940s platform sandals and big shoulder pads, but copying the American way of throwing on a pair of jeans was like trying to learn Mandarin in a weekend.
I saw Americans on the street in faded blue jeans who looked ostensibly real, and were presumably true to themselves. I had an American passport, so I tried to be real.
Above: Stella Tennant. Helmut Lang FW 2001, NYC. Photo by Henry Mcgee/Globe Photos. Lauryn Hill. Brussels, Belgium,1999. Photo by Gie Knaeps/Getty Images.
I bought tight zippered jeans, I wriggled and I pulled, I was in. But now the jeans were on, what did I put on top? We Mods liked a clean line from the ribs down to the hips, which is why we loved shift dresses. The only T-shirts I owned were imported from Paris and so well-cut that the contrast between the compact torso and the tortured denim below the waist was painful to the eye. I was five foot four and weighed 110 lbs, but the jeans were so tight I couldn’t breathe. The hard fabric dug into my groin when I walked, cut off circulation when I sat, sliced the back of my knees when I kneeled, and made my ass look big.
They were also too long. Could I wear stacked-heel pigskin loafers with jeans? Would antique gold sandals from Portobello Road work? I didn’t have sneakers, I had gym shoes, but gym shoes were for the gym , and flat , and wouldn’t raise the jeans from the ground.
Diana Ross. Studio 54, New York, 1979. Bettman / Getty Images.
“Denim’s sincerity forces you to match its purity.”
And the shade of blue on my jeans was borderline offensive. The faded jeans I saw on Americans were a soft, if prosaic, blue, with a touch of periwinkle. My jeans had a green undertone that I perceived as unforgiving, even deliberately cruel. No other color looked good with them: the green hue rejected any balanced contrast, but if I tried to align with it, there was no shade in the mean green-blue family that would soften its aggression. These jeans didn’t have the white pinpoints in indigo that gave Levi’s their reassuring depth. Levi’s were the esthetic property of the French boys at school who’d made the taming of Levi’s a thing of their own.
Those French boys had relatives who went to the PX stores on US army bases, where, presumably legally, they’d secure authentic American Levi’s. In London, the boys would set about laboriously seasoning their jeans in a ritual as complex as tending an antique car, but more painful. They put on the hard, stiff new jeans and lay in baths of cold water until cramps set in, and then couldn’t sit so they walked around as the cold wet denim slowly molded to their lower limbs and precious parts. A massive effort, I thought, to create the look of casual ease.
I gave my jeans away.
Above: Katharine Hamnett denim campaign, 1995. Below: Contrasts by Koo Stark, 1985.
“A few rips are seductive in the manner of a split banana skin, a burst peach exposing soft flesh.”
Harper’s Bazaar Germany, July 1988 by Hans Feurer.
It took ten years before I tried jeans again. A boyfriend watched me change from a velvet skirt to a challis dress and asked “Don’t you ever wear jeans?”
He was asking if I was ever real.
“No,” I said. But then I found myself in Montana, and I bought Levi’s. I was taller but also plumper, and the denim hurt even more. I gave them away.
I waited another ten years. At the age of 37, I bought a Saint Laurent Rive Gauche bustier, a corset really, a denim corset that buttoned down the front. It had to be worn over a skirt, which was the point. The hardness of the denim found its calling in compressing my breasts and exposing my shoulders; I was vanilla Soft Serve rising from the denim’s cone. The silhouette was perfect when I stood up and held my breath. Sitting was out of the question, an unnecessary intermediate step in any case. This seductive private costume lasted a few weeks.
My experience with denim is that it is so male that it hurts unless it’s been broken in by a male. It’s only recently, in the Orlando stage of my life, that I have found jeans that are neither mendacious nor painful. One of the boys at the Lycée who did the cold bath Levi’s thing grew up, married, had a life, a wife, another wife, children, and life being what it is, his wife died, and we found each other again. And because it is the Orlando stage of life, we are both somewhat shorter than we were before, and both thin; and because he was always real, he has many extra pairs of jeans. I wear the oldest ones.
They fit perfectly.
Margaux Hemingway by Ara Gallant, 1977.
Kirsten Owen. i-D Magazine 1998, Issue #173.
Marithé François Girbaud Jeans Ad, 1990.
November 2025