It is the weekend! Time to have fun and relax, and time for young people to take off their school uniform and put on their favourite casual clothes. When teenagers have a free day, many of them like to wear a pair of denim jeans. Although the styles may change from year to year, jeans never go completely out of fashion. They are part of the lifestyle of many of today's youth.
The idea of blue trousers called jeans came from Europe, and the word "jeans" was first used to describe the blue clothes that sailors in Italy wore in the sixteenth century. However, the jeans of today are very much an American invention. They were created in the 1870s by a shopkeeper in San Francisco. His shop sold denim work. trousers to men employed in heavy labour. The workers liked them because they were cheap and strong. They were also comfortable, especially after they had been washed a few times. The shop was successful, but it was about sixty years before people started to buy jeans for fashion as well as for work.
In the 1930s many movies in the USA showed cowboys in Western America wearing jeans. Cowboys had a reputation for living wild and free, and many young American men dreamed of a similar life, so they dressed to look like their film star heroes. In World War II these men became soldiers and were sent to fight in other countries. They took their favourite pair of jeans with them to wear in their free time, and this is how American jeans were introduced to the world.
After the war ended, American teenagers started to make denim jeans their own unique item of fashion. In the 1950s jeans and rock 'n' roll music became symbols of the new youth. Adolescents at that time enjoyed new and different things. They listened to the new type of music and they wanted to look different too. Many schools in the USA did not approve of students wearing jeans to school and they forbade them. This made jeans even more popular in the evenings and at weekends.
Since then jeans have been through many different changes in style. Some years they have wide legs; at other times narrow legs are the fashion. Tight fitting or loose; coloured, dark blue or light blue; decorated with holes, paint or flowers --jeans are constantly changing. In the 1990s a new material was added to the cotton to make it stretch and give an even tighter fit over the bottom and legs. More recently it became popular to wear jeans that looked very old and companies started to produce new jeans that appeared to have been worn for several years and washed many times.
In 1964, a writer for the magazine American Fabrics said, "Denim has become a symbol of the young, active, informal, American way of life." In many respects these words are still true more than forty years later. Nowadays, active and informal young people all over the world wear denim jeans, and they are popular with older people who want to feel young too. In the UK for example, a recent survey found that 6 out of 10 men and 46% of women regularly wear jeans, but it is with young people that they continue to be most fashionable. Jeans are the first choice for 72% of those in the 15-19 age group, whereas less than half of the teenagers in the UK wear other types of casual trousers. Denim jeans are a symbol of the global teenager and it seems likely that they will remain part of international youth culture for many years to come. |