Company News

• One of the staple of modern wardrobes-Mom jeans

  2017 / 12 / 23

  One of the staple of modern wardrobes-Mom jeans Mom jeans is the informal term now used to refer to a style of women's jeans which have a high waist above the belly button and are loose-fitting, often with excess material around the crotch and legs. Bucking the trend for fading techniques and different shades of denim, these jeans are also characteristically a very uniform, solid blue. Other common features include pleats, tapered legs and elastic waistbands. The expression [mom jeans" is mildly pejorative, though in a light-hearted, humorous way. The very staple of most modern wardrobes, there's been an explosion in terminology for the different types of jeans on offer over the last couple of decades. There's now a whole gamut of styles, including crop or cropped – cut off just below the knee (and usually worn in the summer), skinny – with very tight legs, or the eyewatering spray-on, which are even tighter. At the other end of the spectrum, more baggy varieties include bootcut – with legs that are wider at the bottom, drop-crotch – which have extra material sagging down between the legs, boyfriend – a sloppy, comfy variety (the term takes inspiration from the idea of a woman borrowing her fella's clothes) and the more generic low-rise – a style designed to sit just below the waist.

• How jeans came out

  2018 / 03 / 14

  How jeans came out Levi Strauss, a young man from Germany, arrived in California in 1850. It was the time of the Gold Rush. Thousands of people were coming to California to dig for gold. And Levi Strauss came to sell canvas to these gold miners. Canvas was a heavy fabric. So Levi Strauss thought the miners might need it to mend tents. One day Strauss heard a miner said he couldn't find clothes strong enough for the work he was doing. Strauss got an idea. He quickly took some of his canvas and made it into trousers. These trousers were just what the miners needed. In one day he sold all the trousers he had made. Strauss wanted to make better trousers. So he bought the fabric that was softer than canvas but just as strong. This fabric came from Nimes, a city in France, so the miners called it [denim" and bought more trousers from Strauss.

• The best history money can buy-The meaning of blue jeans

  2017 / 12 / 23

  Ms McClendon describes economic and commercial forces at work in the 1930s. Denim sales to working-class customers slumped during the Depression. At the same time ranchers in need of extra income touted their properties as [dude ranches" at which affluent tourists could play at cowboys, apeing favourite film stars. Even Depression-era protectionism arguably played a role: Sandra Comstock, a sociologist at Reed College in Oregon, has written that tariffs on imported French clothing prodded department stores to promote domestic fashions including jeans. Myth-making about jeans suggests a political conclusion, too: that for a supposedly classless country America takes a complicated view of work. Study denim's history and it is hard to avoid concluding that heroic individuals roaming the land, such as cowboys, are easier to sell as fashion icons than folk who toil by the hour in a factory, garage or field, taking orders from a boss. The first gallery at the FIT exhibition shows how the earliest denim clothes were often uniforms: it includes a prison uniform, sailor's overalls and, most tellingly, the sort of blue work-shirt made of chambray (a cousin of denim) that inspired the term [blue-collar worker" back in the 1920s. Yet, other than to a few urban hipsters in recent decades, chambray shirts have mostly lacked the [cross-over cool" of denim jeans, says Fred Dennis, senior curator at the FIT-they did not fit into a [romanticised, cool-dude weekend look". Small wonder that blue-collar workers feel forgotten.