Denim is a staple in our wardrobes. From the guy building your house to the guy selling your house, the guy fixing the plumbing to the guy who owns the building it is in, every man wears denim. Jeans are one of the few items across menswear that span the gap between all demographics. Rich or poor, working stiff or executive weekend warrior, we all love a good pair of jeans. It is crazy to think that the pair of jeans you wear today traces its origins back to the Gold Rush and spent its first century planted firmly in the work world. A lot has changed since then, and there is a deep history. We couldn’t possibly pick through all of it, so we decided instead to reach out to a professional who has forgotten more about jeans than we will ever know. Founder of DUER, Gary Lenett, spent decades in the jeans industry with every top brand you have in your closet. Now, he spends his time developing jeans himself, looking for a better way. We got a chance to sit down with Gary to get his take on the legendary garment and its staying power.
Jeans have made massive changes in the last half-century. Here is a look at denim through the years and what we can expect in the future of its journey from the perspective of someone driving the bus himself.
Gold digging functionality
Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes in the menswear industry knows the story of Levi Strauss and his entrepreneurial innovation during the Gold Rush in the 1850s. While men searched for their fortune, Strauss made his own when he saw a pain point in their clothing. He pinpointed the need for more durable and rugged attire for digging for gold. And the jeans were born. They stayed largely the same until incredibly recently. Lenett remembers jeans from his childhood were alarmingly close to the ones Strauss invented a century before.
“When I was a young man, I would get my mom to buy me jeans,” Gary remembers. “I couldn’t wear them to school, and you certainly couldn’t wear them to work if you were working age. I would get my mom to buy me jeans and wash them at least eight times before I could even wear them. They were stiff as a board. You could literally stand them up because they had the original starch. They hadn’t changed since Levi Strauss invented them in the 1850s.”
Emergence of the bad boy
Like any garment with staying power, there was a change. A large shift in the industry breathed new life into a classic. In the case of jeans, it came with a rebellious edge thanks to the likes of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. These iconic moments in time took the old jeans and brought them to a new generation of men who were ready in the 50s through the 70s to rebel against their society and change the world.
“Because they were restricted. Let’s call them the establishment…they said, ‘You can’t wear them to school,’ ‘You can’t wear them to work,’ you still can’t wear them on the golf course,” Lenett says with a hint of humorous frustration. “Because it was forbidden. What happens when things are forbidden? Youth. Youth love that. They can express themselves in ways people before them couldn’t. This is where we got these iconic images of James Dean, and others who stood for rebellious youth start wearing jeans.”
80s designers
Of course, rebellion may be inherently on the opposite side of wealth, but that almost always gives way to capitalism. Flat caps were adopted by the fashion industry after they were forced on the working class in the UK. The peacoat was pulled from the Navy only to be worn in high fashion. The same process took place in the 1980s when high-end designers saw jeans as the next big thing, and they went from rebel wear to big-market fashion behemoths.
“The next huge change in my mind is another iconic image that gets conjured up, and that is Brooke Shields,” Lenett says. “The iconic advertising of Brooke Shields and Calvin Klien in the early 1980s. Up until that time, jeans were seen (both men’s and women’s) as not just casual but really casual. With them and other brands that copied them, jeans went from casual to casual elegance. Women started now going out to dinner and wearing an expensive pair of jeans.”
Performance and stretch
Finally, we find ourselves in the midst of a massive shift in the fashion world. Thanks to an already casualization of society and the cherry on top of a pandemic keeping us indoors, we no longer want to wear anything but conveniently comfortable athleisure. Of course, that doesn’t mean we ditch the trusty jeans. No, instead, we look at companies like DUER to innovate and bring us back something we can use today. This brings us to the performance-based jeans and their addition to the gusset. The change makes their jeans the ones you can wear to do literally anything.
“I think that DUER wants to be the Levi’s of the 21st century, which is taking the iconic jeans and adding the performance element,” Lenett reveals. “I really do think it is about smart clothing. If it isn’t versatile, then it is not optimized.” He then dropped a bomb on what he thinks the next big innovation is in the jeans industry. “I listen to my customers and I solve pain points, and one I want to solve is using a thermometer to adjust the temperature in our house. I don’t know about you, but my wife and I are comfortable at different temperatures. That is a pain point that I believe fabric and wearable tech can solve. Hopefully, in my lifetime.”
Cooling jeans…sign us up.
