“Jeans Are an Attitude, Not Just Trousers”[i]
Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde
BCDSS Exhibition Curator
The quote from the book “The New Sorrows of Young W.” by Ulrich Plenzdorf highlights that clothing is much more than just the medium of a cultural technique that protects the body. As a second skin, clothing always also serves to convey messages, which are carried into the environment with one’s own body. Clothing conveys the identities and affiliations of its users just as much as it can be an expression of protest, resistance, or solidarity.
Jeans as Hard-Wearing Work Trousers
Jeans were developed as work trousers in the USA in around 1870 (fig.1). Levi Strauss, born in Buttenheim in Upper Franconia (in present-day Bavaria/Germany), followed the gold rush to San Francisco after emigrating to the USA. There, while working as a textile and haberdashery merchant, he met the tailor Jacob Davis, to whom he supplied fabrics for work trousers. Davis used rivets to reinforce these trousers at the seams that came under particular strain and tore much too quickly. Strauss and Davis registered a joint patent for these work trousers, which met with strong demand. They had the new work trousers made from a hard-wearing denim fabric. The coarse cotton fabric is created using a special weaving technique and gains its characteristic appearance in that only the warp threads are dyed with indigo, while the weft threads remain their natural white.
Fig. 1: Levi’s jeans (attributed) from 1873 found in a mine shaft in Nevada (photo: courtesy of liveauctioneers.com).[i]
From Work Trousers to Protest Clothing
In the 20th century, wearing jeans became an expression of adolescent protest against the conventions of their society and the dependency relationships associated with them. In Western Europe, blue jeans, as the work trousers were known there, became a symbol of the American Way of Life after the Second World War. For the growing generation of adolescents, they represented freedom and emergence from the confines of post-war society and were popularized by American movies and actors, such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and rock and roll music. It was initially mainly young men who wore blue jeans with their leather jackets. This style of clothing and their somewhat aggressive appearance were a noticeable provocation to society, which responded in a correspondingly hostile manner. With this history, blue jeans gradually developed into a symbol of protest against the rigid civic values of Western societies (fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Hippies wearing Jeans cloth in St. Ives, Cornwall/GB (photo: unknown, 1973).
Jeans as a Political Issue in the GDR
In the GDR, “studded trousers,” as they were known there, were not only a provocation for society in the 1950s and 60s but even a political issue. The government attempted to prohibit the wearing of jeans through harassment and bans. Instead of making use of the former work trousers in its socialist propaganda, the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, as the GDR saw itself, declared jeans to be a symbol of the Western class enemy. The protest symbolism of jeans thus gained a further facet. Anyone who wore jeans in the GDR could thus also express their rejection of narrow-minded politics and the ideologized society. From the 1970s onward, the GDR government began to come around and the textile industry ultimately brought its own jeans brands onto the market. The aim was to remove the anti-state symbolism from the popular item of clothing and weaken the visual dominance of Western brands (fig. 3).
Fig. 3: Wisent-Jeans from GDR production (photo: © Sammlung DDR Museum, Berlin).
Jeans and Fair Fashion
Jeans have lost their once high symbolic value in modern-day society. However, they are still an indispensable part of fashion and sometimes convey the attitude of their wearers with regard to fair or sustainable textiles. By deciding against fashionable details, such as environmentally harmful stone washing, or the intentional creation of tears in the new fabric – a pronounced form of prosperity cynicism – users can express their awareness of sustainability, solidarity, and fairness (figs. 4 + 5).
Fig. 4: Purposely created wear marks on a pair of ‘stone washed’ jeans. The fabric surface is treated with pumice and chlorine or by sandblasting to give the impression that the jeans have already been worn frequently and are therefore worn out (photo: lanych / Shutterstock.com).
Fig. 5: ‘Ripped jeans’ with artificial rips (photo: Ortis / Shutterstock.com).
Further Reading
Bosse, Ulrike, 2024. Jugend in den 50ern: Rebellion in Jeans und mit Rock ‘n’ Roll. https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/Jugend-in-50ern-Rebellion-in-Jeans-und-mit-Rock-n-Roll,rocknroll110.html
Herzog, Sara, Olivier Bucher und Matthias Broekmann, 2020. Der lange Weg einer Jeans.
MDR, 2022. Wisent, Boxer, Shanty – Jeansfeeling Ost. Die Jugend und die Mode in der DDR. https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/alltag/jeans-in-der-ddr-100.html
Menzel, Rebecca, 2004. Jeans in der DDR – Vom tiefen Sinn einer Freizeithose. Berlin: Chr. Links Verlag.
Plensdorf, Ulrich, 1973. Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Berlin: Hinstorff Verlag.
[i] Edgar Wibeau in Ulrich Plenzdorf, The New Sorrows of Young W., 1973.
[i] https://www.liveauctioneers.com/price-result/oldest-known-1800-s-vintage-levis-denim-501-jeans-dated-to-1873/?srsltid=AfmBOoqGcyu3-D71O-xqfoSWeyuBzIw1dLor0Sf879h0H5uuQtuVHD2m