Complex Numbers

It's In My Genes

It is now time for me to wrap up my April entries into "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]. Of the nine prompts I haven't tackled yet, which one will my random number generator choose this morning? Let's find out...

denim

Oh, glorious.

My dad always called blue jeans "dungarees." His attire of choice was denim overalls, because by the time I became self-aware, he had retired from the military and become a farmer, and just as military officers wear uniforms, farmers wear overalls. He didn't call the overalls "dungarees," though. I don't know why and I certainly can't ask him now. Probably, like about 80% of what he did, it was to annoy me, because I liked wearing blue jeans and hated the word "dungarees" because it started with the sound "dung," which, as farmers, we were all too familiar with. Still, many people, especially in his day, used the words interchangeably.

Nowadays I like wearing black jeans, often faded to what my friends called "gamer gray," but while the color and the waist measurement have changed, they still come from Levi Strauss, complete with rivets at the seam junctions.

Turns out that denim   and dungaree   fabric, while similar, aren't actually the same thing. The latter was apparently invented in India many centuries ago, but the particular combination of dye and weave that go into a pair of blue jeans dates back to maybe the 19th century, with the invention of blue jeans coming shortly after the end of the US Civil War.

If you bother going to those links above, you'll see what people like to ding Wikipedia on: one calls dungaree a predecessor or precursor to denim, while the other asserts that the connection is unclear. This is why consulting footnotes and other sources is important. But I'm aware that's a lot of work, and in spite of my predilection for wearing what was originally a working-class pair of pants, I'm allergic to work.

No disrespect intended to the Indian subcontinent origin of dungaree—that culture invented many essential things for society, including our counting numbers (they're called Arabic numerals, but it turns out the Arabs borrowed the system from India). It's clear to me, though, that denim as we know it today had its origin in the same place so much fashion came from: France. Specifically, the town called Nimes, in the south. De Nimes apparently got Anglicized as denim.

Which makes me think that "jeans" should be pronounced "zhahns" in the manner of Jean-Luc Picard, but that turns out not to be the case. Apparently (at least according to one of the non-Wikipedia sources I looked at), its etymology comes from the port of Genoa, which in French is or was called Genes, not to be confused with chromosomes. Why this is the case, I couldn't be arsed to figure out; I did look at a map, which shows that while Nimes is close to la mer Méditerannée, there are at least two perfectly good French ports (Marseille and Nice) between Nimes and Genes.

In any case, you know what the French word for jeans is? It's not pronounced like Admiral Picard's name. No, it's pronounced almost exactly like Anglophones pronounce it (the 'j' sound is a bit different), which must be a source of early heart attacks for members of l'Academie française.

But jeans as we know them aren't French; they're indisputably a Jewish invention.

Gotcha. No, Levi Strauss (German-Jewish family) didn't invent blue jeans; a tailor of Lithuanian-Jewish origin named Jacob Davis (last name changed upon immigration, as with many immigrants) invented them (or at least perfected their durability by using rivets) in Nevada (which had just barely become a US State), but apparently couldn't keep up with demand, so he partnered up with Levi-Strauss to meet production needs.

The rest, as they say, is history.

To summarize, it's an Indian inspiration for a French fabric that was perfected as work clothing by Jewish immigrants in the Wild West of the US. It would be difficult to get more multicultural than that, but I suspect you can find other examples of intercultural fashion development if you try.

I mentioned in a previous entry the persistence of rivets in Levis despite advances in clothing technology that render them mostly decorative now. At the time of their invention, though, riveting the weak spots was the innovation that made jeans the preferred outfit of the working class.

They never did, as far as I know, rivet the crotch. I mean, I can kind of understand why; metal tends to get hot in the sun, and the last place you want to heat up is right under your balls. Or, if you don't have them, your cooch.

So that's what always fails first for me on a pair of black Levis (though usually only after a few good years of stalwart service). Hopefully not while I'm in public. Nothing's perfect.

But in a world dominated by throwaway fashion, it's good to know some clothing is still built to to stand the test of time.

Speaking of which, there's one final thing I want to add: that little pocket on the right where you might keep an emergency quarter or two, or a key? The original purpose of that was to hold a pocket watch. Because no matter how hard you work, you still need to keep track of time.