DU 003: Boom to Bust (1945 - 2017)

← Previous: DU 002  |  ↑ Denim University  |  Next: DU 004 →

By Eric Steffen
Founder / Maker
FITTED Underground

The war is over. The GIs are home. Denim has just traveled the world on the backs of American soldiers and left a trail of longing behind it — in postwar Europe, in occupied Japan, behind the Iron Curtain where a pair of Levi's could command a week's wages on the black market. Back home, a generation raised on rationing and war is hungry for pleasure, identity, and something that feels like their own. They're about to find it at the movies.

The Rebels: The 1950s

Two films. Two men. One garment that would never be the same again.

In 1953, Marlon Brando played motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler in The Wild One — leather jacket, Levi's jeans, a sneer that asked nothing of anyone. "What are you rebelling against?" someone asks. "Whaddaya got?" Two years later, James Dean played Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause — dark jeans, white t-shirt, the look of a boy the world hadn't made room for yet. Both films caused moral panic in direct proportion to their cultural impact. Schools banned jeans. Parents wrote letters to school boards. Theaters refused to admit anyone wearing them. And every teenager in America immediately wanted a pair.

John Wayne had been wearing denim on screen since the 1930s — the strong, silent cowboy, the man of the West, denim as the uniform of quiet competence. Dean and Brando took the same garment and made it mean the opposite: danger, youth, the refusal to behave. Elvis Presley wore denim on Ed Sullivan and the switchboards lit up. The garment had found its generation. One newspaper of the era quoted a statistic that felt both alarming and inevitable: ninety percent of American youth wore jeans everywhere except bed or church.

John Wayne wore denim as quiet competence. Dean and Brando took the same garment and made it mean the opposite: danger, youth, the refusal to behave.

It's worth noting that the word "jeans" itself only became common in the 1950s. Before that they were "waist overalls" — the term Levi Strauss & Co. had used since 1873. The baby boomers renamed them, which was fitting. They were remaking everything else too.

The Protest: The 1960s

Something unexpected happened as the decade turned. Denim, already the uniform of the rebel, became the uniform of the righteous.

Civil rights activists made a deliberate choice to wear denim overalls and work clothes to marches and demonstrations. The garment of the sharecropper, the garment of the field worker, worn intentionally in front of cameras and hostile crowds: we are here, we are part of this country, and this country has not kept its promises. In April 1962, the town of Huntsville, Alabama held a "Blue Jean Sunday" — a boycott of Easter department store shopping to protest segregation. Clothing stores estimated they lost a million dollars. Jeans, born partly from the labor of enslaved people, were worn as a protest against the systems that had enslaved them.

Meanwhile the counterculture was running its own denim story. Bell bottoms. Patched jeans. Hand-painted denim. Hippies and Vietnam protesters and back-to-the-land dreamers all in blue. The Grateful Dead in Haight-Ashbury. Students at Berkeley in denim sitting down in front of police cars. The garment absorbed every meaning asked of it — rebellion, solidarity, freedom, refusal — without losing its essential character. By the late 1960s, Paul Newman wore it with the ease of a man comfortable in his own skin. Sidney Poitier wore it off-screen with a dignity that made a quiet argument about who belonged in American culture. Steve McQueen wore it and looked as though he'd been born in it. Jeans had crossed every social line that existed. They belonged to everyone who wanted them.

The garment absorbed every meaning asked of it — rebellion, solidarity, freedom, refusal — without losing its essential character.

The Mainstream: The 1970s

The counterculture went mainstream and denim went with it. By the early 1970s, jeans were everywhere — not a statement anymore, just clothes. Five-pocket denim became the default youth uniform across America and Europe. Which is precisely when fashion got nervous.

If everyone is wearing jeans, how do you sell more jeans? How do you create desire for something that has become as basic as a white t-shirt? The answer arrived simultaneously in several Los Angeles and New York design offices: put your name on the back pocket. Charge more. Make the logo the product.

Calvin Klein launched his designer jeans in Bloomingdale's in 1976. They flopped completely. Then Carl Rosen of Puritan Fashions offered him a million dollars upfront — plus another million annually — to try again. Klein hired a fifteen-year-old model named Brooke Shields and let her say something that made middle America splutter into its coffee: "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins." Sales increased sevenfold in a year. Gloria Vanderbilt — old American money, a name that hadn't worked for its fortune since the railroads — put her signature and a swan on the back pocket and sold millions of pairs. Jordache. Sergio Valente. Sasson. The era of brand-as-identity had arrived.

Bruce Springsteen released Born to Run in 1975 — jeans, a leather jacket, the working class in full voice. He would be the last great rock star for whom denim meant labor rather than fashion. The handoff was underway.

A Kid in the 1980s

I'm a child of the 1980s, so I want to speak to this decade from personal experience before I speak to it historically.

I had my bleach washed jeans. I learned to do a French cuff in middle school and thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done. I was not wrong — for the time, for the moment, for who I was at twelve years old. And I loved those jeans with an intensity that only a middle schooler can love a pair of jeans. I wore them on ski trips, which was not wise — denim on a black diamond in the NorthEast in January means cold legs and a long afternoon — but there was no version of reality in which I was putting on ski pants when my jeans were right there. Cold legs were worth it.

Looking back, I prefer something more classic. There is nothing that compares to the fade process of raw denim — the way a pair of jeans becomes, over years of wear, a record of your specific body and your specific life. The bleach wash was fun. It was the time. But it was someone else's idea of what your jeans should look like, applied industrially. The fade you earn is yours alone.

The 1980s were a decade that confused having things with being things. That confusion ran deeper than fashion.

The Dark Decade: The 1980s

Gordon Gekko declared that greed was good in 1987, and a whole generation took notes. The decade that celebrated excess was simultaneously hollowing out the industries that had given American workers their dignity.

In denim, the 1980s produced two simultaneous and contradictory developments. On the surface: designer denim everywhere, acid wash, stone wash, pre-ripped, pre-distressed — a decade of artificial aging applied to a fabric whose entire value, historically, came from authentic aging. Manufacturers were now selling you jeans that looked worn before you'd worn them, fades that belonged to no one's life in particular. The garment that had been about durability and honest wear was being processed in industrial dryers with pumice stones to simulate a history it hadn't lived.

Underneath: manufacturing collapse. NAFTA wouldn't arrive until 1994, but the economic logic of cheap offshore labor was already rewriting the map of American industry through the 1980s. Sewing machine operators in the Carolinas and Tennessee were losing jobs that would not come back. The Big Three — Levi's, Lee, Wrangler — were all chasing volume over quality. Levi's experimented with designer-inspired lines and lost credibility with its core customer. Lee followed fashion trends it didn't understand. Wrangler held closer to its rodeo roots but couldn't escape the gravitational pull of mass-market mediocrity. The decade that celebrated the idea of American greatness was systematically dismantling the manufacturing base that had made American goods worth celebrating.

Manufacturers were selling you jeans that looked worn before you'd worn them — fades that belonged to no one's life in particular. The garment that had been about honest wear was being processed with pumice stones to simulate a history it hadn't lived.

Vaulting ambition, Shakespeare wrote, which o'erleaps itself. That's precisely what happened to American industry in the 1980s.

The Nineties: Big, Baggy, and Global

The 1990s reacted against the 1980s the way every decade reacts against the one before it — by doing the opposite. Grunge rejected polish and embraced intentional destruction. Hip-hop embraced volume, drape, and a silhouette that had no interest in the fitted workwear traditions that had produced denim in the first place. Karl Kani started selling oversized denim out of the trunk of his car in Brooklyn in the late 1980s and built a streetwear empire that dressed a generation. Michael Jordan in his off-court life wore the loose, relaxed denim of the era — a cultural signal as powerful as any runway look. JFK Jr. stepped out in worn jeans and a sport coat and reminded old money that denim worn with confidence needed nothing else.

The decade was fragmentary. Grunge tore denim up. Hip-hop made it enormous. Prep wore it with blazers. High fashion put it on runways. Every subculture had its own denim language, and none of them spoke to each other. But beneath all of it, quality continued to erode. Mass production, synthetic indigo, stretch blends, overseas manufacturing. The jeans got cheaper. More disposable. The fade — the thing raw denim wearers live for, the record of a life worn into cloth — became something you bought rather than something you earned.

The Floor Drops Out: Fast Fashion Arrives

Let's back track a little bit to pick up on a theme we've been discussing but haven't named explicitly.

On December 31, 1989 — the same week the Berlin Wall came down — the New York Times used a new phrase to describe a Spanish clothing chain called Zara: "fast fashion." The term referred to Zara's operating model: take a garment from a designer's sketch to a store rack in fifteen days. No waiting for seasonal collections. No inventory risk. Just speed, volume, and the constant churn of newness.

It seemed like a retail innovation. It was actually a values revolution — and denim would feel it more than any other garment.

The economic machinery had been assembling for years. Trade relations with China opened in the 1970s. Containerized shipping made offshore manufacturing viable at scale in the 1980s. NAFTA arrived in 1994 and accelerated the exodus of American garment manufacturing to Mexico, and then further — to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, wherever labor was cheapest and regulations lightest. The sewing machine operators in the Carolinas and Tennessee who had been losing work through the 1980s lost the rest of it in the 1990s. Those jobs did not come back. They were not meant to.

H&M reached the United States in 2000. Zara followed. Forever 21. By the mid-2000s, the two traditional fashion seasons — spring/summer and fall/winter — had been replaced by what the industry quietly began calling micro-seasons. Zara was producing twenty-four collections a year. The implied message to the consumer was simple and relentless: what you bought last month is already old. Buy something new.

For denim, this meant the price floor collapsed. A pair of jeans at H&M or Forever 21 cost fifteen dollars. At fifteen dollars, a pair of jeans is not an object you invest in, break in, repair, or love. It is a disposable. You wear it until it falls apart — which it does quickly, because it was built to — and then you buy another one. The entire relationship between a person and their clothing changes when the clothing costs less than a restaurant meal. You don't form a relationship with it. You consume it.

This is the economic context for everything that follows in the denim story: the hollowed-out Big Three, the collapse of White Oak, the futile attempt of premium denim brands to substitute price for craft. Fast fashion didn't just change what jeans cost. It changed what jeans meant — or rather, it drained them of meaning entirely, replacing it with volume, novelty, and the dopamine of the next thing.

Between 2000 and 2019, global clothing production doubled. The average American today buys roughly sixty-eight garments per year — five times what their grandparents bought in the 1980s — and throws away roughly eighty pounds of textiles annually. Most of it ends up in landfills. A significant portion of it is denim. The garment that Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis designed to last a decade of hard labor is now, in its mass-market form, designed to last a season.

Something was gained — access, affordability, the democratization of fashion for people who couldn't afford department store prices. That's real and worth acknowledging. But something was lost that is harder to name and harder to recover: the sense that a garment is worth caring for. That repair is preferable to replacement. That the things we wear can accumulate meaning rather than just accumulate. The closet got full. The jeans started meaning less. And somewhere in North Carolina, the looms kept running — for a little while longer.

The Premium Mirage: The 2000s

Before the final chapter of this story arrives, there was one more attempt by American denim to matter — and it got the diagnosis right but the prescription wrong.

Around 2000, a small group of Los Angeles designers looked at the thirty-dollar jeans flooding mall stores and asked a different question: what if denim cost two hundred dollars? Seven For All Mankind launched in 2000, founded by designers who spotted a gap between mass-market and genuine luxury. Their jeans were tight, polished, built around fit, with intricate back-pocket stitching that became a status signal as recognizable as a handbag logo. Angelina Jolie wore them. Jennifer Aniston wore them. True Religion followed in 2002 — bolder, louder, with horseshoe stitching so thick it announced itself across a room. By mid-decade, Fergie was name-dropping "Sevens" and "True Religion" in Black Eyed Peas songs, which is as clear a signal of cultural saturation as any era produces.

The premium denim boom was, in its way, a genuine attempt to make jeans mean something again after two decades of disposability. But it confused price with craft. The fabric was still mass-produced. Still chemically distressed. Still made offshore. What you were paying for was the logo on the pocket and the celebrity on the billboard — not the denim itself. It was the designer jean moment of the 1980s in better-fitting pants.

Then 2008 arrived and reset everything. The financial crisis made two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar jeans with embroidered horseshoes feel obscene. The premium denim market collapsed almost as fast as it had risen. Seven For All Mankind was sold to VF Corporation. True Religion would eventually file for bankruptcy. And the brands that had defined a decade of American denim culture couldn't survive the reckoning with reality.

But while all of this was happening — while American denim lurched from acid wash to designer logos to premium mirage — something very different was taking place across the Pacific. Something quiet. Something serious. Something that had been building for thirty years. That story is DU 004.

December 31, 2017: The Looms Go Silent

We need to end this article here, in a specific building, on a specific night.

Founded in 1905 by Moses and Caesar Cone — German immigrant brothers who had built a textile brokerage into one of the largest denim operations on earth — the White Oak plant in Greensboro, North Carolina became the most important denim mill in American history. By 1908 it was the largest denim producer on the planet. From 1915 onward it was the exclusive supplier of selvedge denim for Levi's 501 — the fabric inside the most iconic pair of jeans ever made. Over a century of operation it employed generations of Greensboro families, mastered shuttle loom technology that larger mills had abandoned, and produced denim that denim enthusiasts across the world recognized as among the finest available anywhere.

By 2017 it was the last selvedge denim mill in America. When its ownership — a California private equity firm that had acquired the parent company for ninety-nine million dollars — reviewed the numbers and decided it wasn't profitable enough, they announced the closure. The denim community learned the news in October 2017. The looms ran until December 31st. Two hundred workers went home. A small San Francisco brand that denimheads know and love called Tellason, it turned out, had been the fourth-largest customer at the last American selvedge mill — which tells you everything about how far the major brands had drifted from the fabric that made them.

On December 31, 2017, the shuttle looms at White Oak went quiet. The American denim century — from miners in the Sierra Nevada to rebels on movie screens to civil rights marchers — was over.

On the last day of 2017, the shuttle looms at White Oak went quiet. The American denim century — the one that had started with miners in the Sierra Nevada and passed through cowboys and rebels and civil rights marchers and rock stars — was over. The question was whether anything would come after it. The answer to that question was already being woven, on vintage Toyoda looms in Osaka and Kojima, by craftspeople who had never forgotten what American denim was supposed to be.

What Comes Next

While American denim spent decades chasing volume, novelty, and the next trend, a country on the other side of the Pacific was doing something quietly extraordinary. Japan had received American jeans from GIs after World War II, fallen in love with them, and then — as American businesses sacrificed quality for profit — decided to preserve what had been lost. They kept their own vintage Toyoda shuttle looms running. They studied vintage jeans, seam by seam. They applied a thousand years of indigo craft tradition to the problem of making a better jean.

In doing so, they demonstrated something important: that there is another way to make clothing. Not faster and cheaper — but slower and more deliberate. A garment made to last a decade rather than a season. A pair of jeans worth repairing rather than replacing. An economy that uplifts craft, rather than just volume, as an expression of cultural values.

By the time White Oak closed on New Year's Eve 2017, Japan hadn't just caught up to American denim. It had surpassed it — and done so on its own terms. That story, and what it could mean for the future of American fashion, is DU 004.

← Previous: DU 002 — Blue Jean Baby (1800–1945)  |  Next: DU 004 — How Japan Saved Raw Denim →

Further Reading

• Riveted: The History of Jeans — PBS American Experience
• Fifty Years of Jeans Fashion — PBS American Experience
• How Denim Became a Political Symbol of the 1960s — Smithsonian Magazine
• Who Killed the Cone Mills White Oak Plant? — Heddels

Eric Steffen is the founder of FITTED Underground, a custom jeans and raw denim workshop at 108 Bayard Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has been making jeans by hand since 2014. Denim University is his attempt to share everything he's learned — about the history, the craft, and the culture behind the world's most enduring garment.