What’s the difference between jeans and denim?
The terms jeans and denim are often used interchangeably, but, strictly speaking, jeans refers to the garment and denim to the fabric used to make the garment.
Denim is a sturdy cotton textile that is woven in a twill pattern, creating a distinctive diagonal rib on the fabric’s surface. Modern denim may also contain synthetic fibers to increase the fabric’s durability, softness, or stretch. Although denim can be produced in many colors, it is most associated with indigo blue. Only the lengthwise, or warp, yarns are dyed, while the crosswise, or weft, yarns remain undyed, giving denim its characteristic blue face and lighter underside.
Although denim is often regarded as a classic American fabric, its origins likely lie elsewhere. Historians have traced its development to several possible sources, including Dungri, India, and the European weaving centers of Nîmes, France, and Genoa, Italy.
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Paintings by the “Master of the Blue Jeans,” an unidentified 17th-century Italian artist, depict peasants wearing a blue fabric that closely resembles denim, suggesting that the textile has been in use for centuries. And, as the artworks show, before jeans, denim was sewn into a number of different types of garments, including aprons and skirts. Indeed, even after modern jeans were invented in the late 19th century, denim continued to be used to make such apparel as work jackets, prison uniforms, naval fatigues, and jumpsuits.
Jeans originated as durable work trousers, usually made from denim fabric. Modern jeans emerged in the late 19th century, when Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, reinforced the stress points of a pair of work pants with small copper rivets. Recognizing the commercial potential of the design but lacking the capital to manufacture it himself, Davis partnered with Levi Strauss, whose San Francisco dry-goods company supplied Davis’s fabric. In 1873 the two men received a U.S. patent for riveted work trousers, then known as “waist overalls.” Levi Strauss & Co. initially produced the garments in both denim and duck, a heavy plain-woven cotton fabric, but denim became the more popular seller and ultimately the standard.
Jeans may have begun as practical workwear, but they evolved during the 20th century into one of the world’s most influential garments. They became associated with the American West, youth culture, civil rights, hip-hop, and high fashion. Today jeans are worn worldwide and valued not only for their durability and comfort but also for their ability to transcend boundaries of class, gender, age, and national identity.