Wentzville High School - Pow Wow Yearbook (Wentzville, MO)

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Why the jeaning of the world? A fashion is easier to follow if it is both chic and cheap, explains one manufacturer. And jeans are undeniably fashionable and af- fordable, as well as sturdy and comfortable You can dress down in S2 recycled jeans from Goodwill--or dress up in a S200 sky- blue jeans suit. Perhaps more important, jeans are an idea, a concept, a sit-on-the floor attitude. Jeans represent a casual life-style that is being adopted by a growing part of the worId, says Walter A. Haas, Jr., chair- man of Levi Strauss 8: Co. , the world's largest manufacturer of jeans. And it's no coincidence that both the life-style and the gamient itself spran out of the free-swing- ing, colorful days of California's Gold Rush. H , xx X l, .14 ln 1850, Levi Strauss, a 20-year-old Bavarian immigrant, arrived by sailing ship in San Francisco to seek his fortune in the gold fields. He brought with him a stock of dry goods including some heavy brown can- vas he planned to sell to miners for tents and wagon covers. Tents, he soon found, were not in demand, but few prospectors had work clothes study enough to stand up to the rough life of the diggings. The enter- prising young man had a tailor make pants out of his rugged canvas. Word spread that those pants of Levi's lhence Levi'si were the strongest around, and they sold quickly. Convinced that he had found a good thing,

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The world is in the grip of a blue-jeans frenzy. Once the no-nonsense work pants of farmers, Iumberjacks, and miners--and few others--jeans now strut, stride, stroll and slouch everywhere, on the job and off. They are at home in palaces CPrincess Anne of England wore them when she had her hair done on her wedding dayl and at parties tauthor Norman Mailer and actor Marlon Brando have appeared in them at black-tie affairsl. They are smuggled into Eastern Europe ian S8 pair of basic jeans currently fetches S90 on the Russian black marketl. School campuses from Omaha to Oska are so awash in a sea of unisex jeans the pants worn round the world fad, fashion, phenomenon - jeans have seized us all by the seat that one might suspect they are compulsory wear. The globe's most popular pants are today manufactured on every continent except Antarctica, and world-wide production is fast heading toward the billion-pair-a-year mark. Last year, American textile mills, working three shifts a day, six days a week, turned our more than 400 million square yards of denim, primarily for jeans. Although this was enough fabric to encir- cle the earth nine times at the equator, it fell 100 million yards short of demand.

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thing, Levi opened a work-clothes shop in San Francisco Knot far from the com- pany's current headquarters in the 29- story Levi Strauss Buildingl. When canvas ran out, he switched to a tough cotton fabric originally loomed in Nimes, France, called serge de Nimes, or simply denim. CGenoese sailors had long worn pants of similar fabric, known as genes, and later jeans.7 Tall tales of denim's indestructi- bility proliferated. In one story, when the coupling between two railroad cars broke, a trainman hitched them together with a pair of Levi's and made it ten miles to the next station. The truth was perha s less dramatic, but the robust work clothes made by Levi Strauss, his relatives and competitiors did in fact uniform the men who laid the rail- road tracks, rounded up the cattle, cut the forests, farmed the plains and built the cities of this fast-growing nation. By the 1950's, jeans had become the staple play-garb of children, and teen- agers began battling parents and high- school administrators for the right to wear jeans to classes. In the course of this struggle, jeans themselves became a sym- bol of defiance against authority or op- pression, whether parental or political, real or imagined. Their secret message identified youthful wearers one to another. l am one of ou--against the others. In the early 19ZO's, the civil-rights march- ers, screaming youngsters at Beatles con- certs, anti-war activists, college protest- ers and higpies--all seized upon blue jeans as t eir very own. But a funny thing hap end on the way to the barricades. Fashion dlscovered blue jeans. Suddenly, stores blossomed with jeans, not only for blue-collar workers and rebel- lious youth but for family members of all ages and all income levels. No longer were there just standard jeans--tight around the hips, with multiple pockets and double-stitched seams--but all manner of variations: flared legs, bell bottoms, cuffs, wide belt loops, tricky pockets, fancy stitching, lighter-weight fabrics, rainbow l colors. Overnight, the nation joyfully l donned jeans and was off--cycling, garden- N ing, boating, bowling, horseback riding, back-yard barbecueing. Although outraged to find themselves wear- ing the same gear as their parents, young p hotheads refused to abandon the jeans that T had become like a second skin. Instead, they wore theirs more ferociously than N ever. Holes? Patch or embroider them. l Rips? Sew a piece of braid on top. Seat gone? Salvage the part from another worn pair. Legs torn? Amputate them and flaunt the frayed edges. Faded? Groovy. The tattered look of raveled, beat-up jeans be- came another way of nosethumbing at the world of materia ism and status. But, once again, fashion co-opted its op- position. Nlachine-embroidered patches