MY jeans cling to me. Like a layer of second skin, they drape over my legs, masking my overly skinny thighs, accentuating my pancake like flat derriere, making me feel wanted and wanton. They transform me into a swaggering, libidinous creature, giving me the license to objectify myself, to turn myself from shy to shark. From the man I am, to the man I want to be.

In my closet, I have drawers full of old jeans that I can’t bear to get rid of. All those jeans have lived with me so intimately through the years that they are now maps of my life. They have in fact become the living. More than just covering up or transforming my body, they have held me. They have comforted and supported me, and reminded me that I am girded for the struggle. Putting on my jeans has made many rough mornings easier. My jeans have kept my faith.

Although fashion is often labelled frivolous and vain, it is actually one of the most powerful forces in the world. By coupling the living body with the inanimate object, fashion triumphs over the vicissitudes of life and death. At the heart of fashion lies a fetishism based on the sex appeal of the inorganic, because fashion is the symbiosis of the organic with the inorganic, and the Blue Jeans is perhaps the first child of this everlasting coupling.

But, it all began so differently. The history of the Blue Jeans dates back to the 16th century. The etymology of the word ‘jeans’ comes from the Italian word ‘Genoese’, which was the name for the Italian sailors of Genoa. These sailors wore garments made from blue fabric that was a cotton and wool/linen blend. This fabric, in turn, was called ‘Serge De Nimes’, ‘Serge’ being the wool/linen blend manufactured in the French town of Nimes. By the time the fabric wove its way into the American heartland in the 19th century, the ‘Serge’ was dropped and ‘De Nimes’ became Denim. And then, two men named Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis gave birth to an idea. An idea, that since its invention in 1873, has smudged the boundaries of class, gender, age, caste and even religion, like very few ideas ever have.

 

These two visionary American immigrants turned denim, thread and a little metal into the most popular and enduring and timeless clothing product in the world. A product that would not only go onto sustain fashion empires and industries in the darkest hours of downturns and declines, but one that would from its first avatar as dowdy and hardy waisted overalls, that were made in response to the tough and sturdy clothes required by the gold rush miners, metamorphose into every conceivable fashion product imagined by any designer, be it a pharaoh or a pipsqueak. But, for all of its chameleon like qualities, the mainstay, the leitmotif of denim, has always been the Blue Jeans.

It was well into the mid-1980s that legendary designer Yves Saint Laurent famously quipped, ‘I wish I had invented the Blue Jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity – all I hope for in my clothes.’ Saint Laurent was a century too late, because by 1880, Levi Strauss’s design of the orange stitching around the back pockets, the rivets and the waist-high overalls tagged ‘501’, had become all the rage with the sailors and the miners. Later, the jackets and the bib front dungarees, named after the blue dye that was only available in the Dongri area of Bombay, became the uniform of workers in every grimy environment.

 

Product placement in cinema is a 21st century phenomenon, but the cowboys in the spaghetti westerns of the 1930s were perhaps the first global brand ambassadors of the Blue Jeans. They portrayed no nonsense tough guys, and the jeans they wore became so emblematic of their machismo that a decade later they became the off-duty uniform of American soldiers, the urban cowboys who came back home for respite, recuperation and reverence, after the lashings of World War Two. As other manufactures like Wrangler and Lee entered the fray and began to nibble at Levi’s lion share, all attention turned and tapped into the rebellion and the radicalism of the baby boomers of the ’50s and the ’60s, for whom jeans were a symbol of egalitarianism in the generational war they waged against those they considered adults, and who were thus targeted as the untouched and virgin market.

In cinema, the sexual savagery of Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire and the raunchy rebellion of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, made the youth of America tremor with a feverish excitement, because a mirror was finally being held up to their own provocations, justifying their need to express themselves, just like their idols, in their Blue Jeans. In music, the arrival of Elvis Presley and The Beatles led to such a hysterical mania that many schools across the USA banned students from wearing denim, because it was now considered the fabric of anarchy. But the cloth had already thickened. Events like the Stonewall Riots of 1969 were a repugnant action against persecuted sexual minorities who wore their tight Blue Jeans, loud and proud. By the time Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin ripped their hearts out and sang Foxy Lady and Ball and Chain, the euphoric crowds, through the haze of LSD and hashish, emulated the psychedelic decadence of their heroes, adorning themselves in embroidered, ripped, painted or muddied Blue Jeans while they floated to society’s edge on narcotic clouds.

 

In the ’80s, fashion designers like Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani and Gloria Vanderbilt didn’t so much tap, but dived into the zeitgeist, and brought to the surface and centre all that was considered radical. Their jeans had studs, crystal beading, fur, feather and they were stonewashed, frayed or delectably destroyed and offered the wearer a chimerical role, where he could have the singular pleasure of inducing himself into his fantasy. As the barely legal Brooke Shields notoriously purred in the controversial Calvin Klein commercial that ‘nothing comes between me and my Calvin’s’, the Blue Jean had vamped its way into the closet of every American, and anyone who didn’t have a pair desperately coveted one.

When the influential American Vogue editor Anna Wintour put a pair of Guess? stonewashed jeans on the cover of the magazine in 1988, the journey of the Blue Jeans had traversed every demographic on the American landscape and had inadvertently become the very fabric of political and social equipoise, and thus, a synonym for democracy. If the American flag were to be ever given a makeover, an image of a pair of distressed Blue Jeans would be the most apt replacement, because in America, whether it was the president or the prostitute, all wore Blue Jeans. Until the backlash.

 

In the early ’90s, denim was suddenly relegated to the shadows. As teen-agers saw their parents squeezing their aging bodies into Blue Jeans, denim became the epitome of uncool and was given a burial under mothballs. Instead, other fabrics and styles like khakis, chinos, combat and carpenter pants came to fashion’s forefront, and wrestled the shelf spaces away from the once ubiquitous Blue Jeans. Levi’s pulled the shutters down on eleven North American factories.

Even Madonna, a global icon and the barometer of perennial cool, while promoting her album ‘Bedtime Stories’ in the mid-90s, famously said that the only item of clothing that will never strike a pose in her endless wardrobe was a pair of Blue Jeans. Towards the latter half of the decade, she hastily ate up her words. For the now seminal music video of her monster hit ‘Ray of Light’, Madonna cavorted and gyrated to hypnotic, electronic beats in a rugged and fitted indigo blue Stella McCartney denim jacket and black embellished jeans, causing such a sales frenzy at the designer’s stores that for a while it became impossible for the designer to make the gluttonous demand meet the fatigued supply. Denim was back with a brand new trick called reinvention up its sleeve.

Whether they were skinny or boot-cut or flared or bell-bottomed or torn or sequined or stonewashed or sandblasted or gunshot or spray-painted or vintage or pink or blue or black or white, jeans were on every catwalk from Milan to Paris to New York to Tokyo and the slavishly obsessed for designer denim phenomenon was born. Even the staid and traditional Levi’s jumped into the fray with its monumentally successful ‘engineered jeans’ that were ergonomically designed and pre-shaped to follow the contours of the body. None of these jeans were less than $250-$1000 a pop, making them the most acquisitive item of clothing on the planet. And if the jeans were too expensive, then even a denim wallet would do, but denim it had to be, whether you were in New York or New Delhi.

 

And it was in New Delhi, in the 1990s, that the last vestiges of India’s semi-socialist regime that had fought a fairly successful battle against American consumerism since 1947 began to chip and fall. As the shackled gates of the Indian economy groaned open, and the blonde buxomed bimbos of ‘Baywatch’ in their fire engine red swimsuits, lustily ran from the beaches of California into Indian hearts and groins, the pants unzipped and fell to ankles that began to writhe out of them for want of something brand new. Something that could make the blondes believe that Indian’s too could be eye candy.

As Bollywood icon and darling to the masses, Salman Khan wrenched open his DKNY t-shirt and wooed the damsel in a buttercup yellow wedding cake meets stage curtain inspired dress, all eyes ignored her daft charms and traversed his body, from his rippling biceps, to his butt hugging Blue Jeans that were threatening to garrote him as they were mysteriously buttoned up right below his nipples. As the economy began to get robust from the changes inspired by U.S. centric economic policies, so did the youth from the multitude of gyms that mushroomed all over the country to feed the sudden fanatical neurosis for fitness. As words like McDonalds and Nike became part of the Indian lexicon and a bereaved and reclusive Italian widow planned her rebirth as the face of India against all odds, the first few stores of Levi Strauss recorded flourishing sales.

 

From the time Bill Clinton visited India in 2000, the fourth American president to do so and first since Jimmy Carter in 1978, to America’s slick door-to-door salesman, Barack Obama’s recently lauded sojourn, where he charmed the pants off the Left, the Right and the Centre, and had the adoring Parliament rise up like a cascading wave of rock concert fans because he announced, after invoking the khadi clad Gujarati Mahatma, and then proclaiming for posterity that ‘India is simply not emerging, it has emerged’ to the status of a great world power, India’s denim industry located in Ahmedabad, Gujarat was contributing 13% denim to the world textile trade, and was expecting a further growth of 8-12% annually. The Indian Dream has come true. We have become the sweetest, the most delicious and certainly the most desirable eye candy. We have become quasi-Americans.

The 650 million metres of denim that India produces per annum is now servicing iconic American corporations like Wal-Mart, Gap and yes, even Levi’s. With Levi’s planning to add 800 new stores by 2011 to its slate and hiring Bollywood heavyweights like Akshay Kumar and Priyanka Chopra as its brand ambassadors, its competitors are not lagging far behind in their efforts to hijack the competition. John Abraham is not just the face of Wrangler but has also launched his own jeans line with Wrangler to bait his young, impressionable fans. And Abhishek Bachchan has been the face of Flying Machine, one of India’s many homegrown denim brands that have been primarily created to seduce India’s second and third tier cities with sexily affordable price points starting at Rs 199.

Nobody be alarmed if they see their cook and their maid cavorting around in spray on, skinny midnight Blue Jeans on their days off. Or on. The nauseating Bollywoodization of every consumer product that has Americanized India, from mobile phones to cold drinks to cable TV and to the Blue Jeans, is a dead give-away of not just that products penetration into the Indian ethos, but also of the big numbers that product can shift, because a Bollywood (and cricket) star is the most idolized and the most expensive spokesman in the country. If jeans symbolize democracy in America, in India they symbolize progress.

 

Some would argue that though there are institutes set up by American returned Indians in Karnataka that familiarize Kannada speaking aspiring Indian businessmen with the mannerisms, culture and work ethic of Americans, and that the predominantly Hindi speaking state of Rajasthan has its villagers scurrying like hungry mice to join English language centres with lofty names as Gothe et Rolland Forum de Lingua and Havard Finishing School (a deliberate misspelling, but an ode nonetheless), 80% of India still lives under desperate economic conditions, and forget about the feel of Blue Jeans, these people don’t even know what clean drinking water tastes like. But India is shining because of its burgeoning, swelling, rocking middle class. This middle class is a primary reason for India’s burnished halo, because this middle class now wants all the things it could never have. Spend and ye shall keep.

 

As I stuck my face to the car window and swooned at the rugged landscape on a recent road trip from Udaipur to Jaipur, I suddenly felt the urge to urinate. Luckily a hideously bucolic motel appeared as the car curved its way around a spectacular looking tent like temple built entirely out of multi-coloured flags, from whose tunnelled entrance emerged a handsome young priest in a kurta and deep Blue Jeans. I wanted to smile, but I sat frozen, fearing that if I moved a single muscle in my body, I may wet my pants, or rather, jeans. Minutes later, I emerged out of the toilet relieved and hungry, but found myself abruptly rooted to the spot. A jolly gang of housewives, with faces decorated like rangoli, with mangalsutras the size of gongs dangling from their fleshy necks and with jeans that exhaustively rode up their spacious bottoms, shrieked in gibberish as they celebrated the bachelorette getaway of the soon to be bride and the only puny little thing in this band of hairless apes.

I stood there, transfixed by everything about them. And then as they clapped their hands and broke into traditional Rajasthani wedding songs, two of them stood up and started coquettishly gyrating to the melody and in that moment, I saw the new face of India. In her Blue Jeans, the shy Indian middle class housewife was a thing of the past. This new-fangled creature, with her brazen mix of tradition and modernity was neither an anomaly nor a pariah. She is very much the arriviste, and She is India. And she is ready to roar.