New Evidence Shows That Denim Originated in 17th Century Italy
21 Sep
There’s no doubting that the denim jean came of age in the 1950′s along with the invention of the teenager and the angst that goes with feeling like an adult but being treated like a child. All the main 50′s icons wore jeans (well, the male ones at least) including Marlon Brando and the most iconic rebel of them all James Dean. But new evidence suggests that the fabric has been around a lot longer than you might imagine.
It’s a well known fact that jeans were originally created to be worn by Cowboys who needed a hard wearing fabric that was as tough as they were. Like a lot of well known facts this isn’t strictly true. Cowboys did wear jeans, they lasted a lot longer than trousers and could be worn for long periods of time without being washed, but the fabric was around a long time before cowboys existed. There are claims that Levi Strauss invented the modern jean in 1873. Again, this is sort of true but people had been wearing Denim for at least 100 years before the USA even existed.
The word Denim comes from the French phrase ‘de Nîmes‘ as in ‘of Nîmes’ (a city in the South of France. The word Jeans comes from the French Gênes which refers to Genoa in Italy. So is Denim from France or Italy? Well we don’t know for sure but some paintings which have recently come to light seem to suggest Italy:
Three paintings have come to light in which the unknown artist, believed to be from northern Italy, depicts scenes in the 1650s in which ordinary people are wearing what appears to be an early denim fabric.
In one picture, a peasant woman, wearing a skirt that appears to be made of denim, mends a piece of clothing. In another, a teenage girl wearing a torn blue skirt made out of rough fabric, begs for money. The third depicts a young boy wearing a torn jacket made from a dark blue cloth. The rips in the jacket, and in the peasant woman’s skirt, reveal that the fabric is indigo but threaded with white – just like modern jeans.
Previously historians relied on the order books of English tailors to backdate the fabric.This is the first pictorial evidence of people wearing jeans in the 17th century, the paintings were thought to have been painted in the 1650′s 300 years before James Dean made jeans cool.





