Denim - A short history of the fabric
From rugged workwear essential to menswear wardrobe staple, denim has come a long way. But where exactly did its journey begin?
Well, the clue is in the name. The word “denim” is an abbreviated form of “serge de Nimes”. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Nimes, in the south of France, boasted a booming textile industry. Among the many materials exported from there was serge – a hard-wearing twill fabric.
There is also a denim fabric predecessor known as dungaree (you’ve heard of them?) that has been produced in India for hundreds of years from a calico cloth - Dungri - talked about in our Dungarees edit a few weeks ago..now the name stuck but the material moved to denim..
Denim has been used in the United States since the middle of the 19th century when a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss brought it to the US in 1853 when he emigrated. Legend has it that denim jean workwear trousers came into being in 1873 when a tailor called Jacob W. Davis manufactured a pair of denim trousers for a customer who had requested a pair of durable work trousers for her husband. When Davis was finishing the denim jeans he added the copper rivets that were laying around his workshop to the pocket corners as he had other customers complaining that their work trousers ripped easily at the pocket opening.
These denim jeans became popular very quickly & he soon found that he could not keep up with demand so he got in touch with his fabric wholesaler Levi Strauss & Co.. the rest is history… ironically it is said that Levi Strauss never wore a pair of his own jeans as he was a wealthy businessman and jeans were made for the poorer people performing manual labour..
Denim jeans became popular outside of the United States in Europe through World War II where US soldiers wore jeans when they were off-duty.. and..
James Dean wore blue jeans in the movie Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. He wore a T-shirt, a leather jacket, and jeans, a uniform men began copying immediately Dean’s Jeans were Lee 101 Riders..
As you can see denim is intrinsically linked to jeans but is not limited by this fact & produces some of the best items in everyones wardrobe..
Manufacture
Cotton fibre is spun into yarn with the warp being the yarn on the outside of the fabric & the weft being the inside of the fabric, the weft passes under two or more warp threads, most commonly the warp is dyed & the weft left un-dyed natural or white but can be almost any colour with some manufactured with a rainbow effect. As a result of the cotton twill weaving process, one side of the fabric is dominated by the blue warp threads and the other side is dominated by the white (or not) weft threads. This causes blue jeans to be white on the inside & blue (indigo) on the outside.
Cotton yarns were first dyed using a skein dyeing process, in which individual skeins of yarn (skein means wound on a reel) which were dipped into dye baths using an indigo dye extracted from the Indigofera plant family much the same as the Noragi work wear in Japan was with Indigofera tinctoria, this is the plant known as natural indigo & is what a purists denim would be coloured with..
Only a few grams of the indigo are required for the colouring of each pair of blue jeans.
Rope dyeing, slasher or sheet dyeing machines were then developed which involves a series of rollers that feed continuous yarns in and out of dye vats. In rope dyeing the yarns are gathered & pulled together in long ropes, this process is quite reliable to evenly distribute the dye as they have to be beamed (wound) on to the loom..
For sheet or slasher dyeing parallel yarns are laid out as a sheet, this sometimes leads to uneven dyeing because of the distribution of the yarns.
There are more & more ways of dyeing fabrics sustainably these days with the process from Candiani https://www.candianidenim.it using state of the art environmentally friendly process, the greenest textile company in the blue world
Most high production denim made today is made on a shuttleless loom that produces bolts (rolls) of fabric 150cm, some denim is still woven on the traditional shuttle loom 75cms wide this is recognisable by its selvedge or selvage, the edge of a fabric created as a continuous cross-yarn, the weft reverses direction at the edge side of the shuttle loom, selvedge is then accentuated with warp threads of one or more contrasting colours on the edge. Like all of ours