Why Levi's 501s are an Icon of Glamour
featuring an extended rant on the systematic devaluing of craftsmanship in America, textile facts, and my most persistent limiting belief! A BONANZA!
I used to work in a men’s clothing store in San Francisco, on Columbus Avenue, beneath the shadow of the TransAmerica building. Though it was a men’s store based in motorcycle and surfing subculture, most of the staff there were women, and I never quite felt like I fit in with the other women working there.
They seemed so much cooler than I was. They had tattoos, and I didn’t. They wore their hair long and flowing--one of them dyed hers unicorn purple--and I had an awkward choppy bob, mousy brown. On their ten minute rest breaks, they would sometimes smoke American Spirit cigarettes. I used mine to go to the doughnut store on the corner and get a maple bar.
There was one other thing that separated them from me, one thing that shouldn’t have been as meaningful as it was but somehow seemed to encapsulate our differences:
They wore vintage Levi’s 501s and I did not.
The 501 is of course a legendary icon in the history of fashion and apparel. The 501 is also, I would argue, the quintessential American consumer product. The “501” number was assigned in the 1890s, though the jeans themselves were first created in the 1870s, before the Ford Model T or Coca-Cola.
501s are still in production today. But while I could walk into the Levi’s store on Market Street and buy a new pair, I didn’t. Because it’s just not the same as the vintage ones that my coworkers wore.
A Phenomenally Unofficial History of Levi’s 501s
Levi’s were originally created for men doing demanding manual labor: predominantly miners but also loggers and factory workers. What made them famous were the rivets used to keep the jeans together, especially on the back pockets. That design detail is also why the Levi Strauss company got their patent in 1873. In the 1930s, the rivets on the back pockets were concealed because people complained that they scratched furniture--which wouldn’t have mattered to a newly transplanted miner, who likely didn’t own furniture--and starting in 1965 the back pocket rivets were done away with entirely in favor of a bar tack stitch.
The fabric used to make them in the nineteenth century was from France, called serge de Nimes, where we get the word denim. Serge de Nimes was incredibly stiff and hard-wearing. That also presumably made them less comfortable than the jeans sold today, which are often processed with enzymes and other chemicals to soften the fibers. We also weave spandex into our denim so that it forgives us when we’ve eaten a particularly large lunch. We are not hardscrabble miners anymore, and you can tell, because our jeans are leggings now.
But until the nineties or so, Levi’s were one hundred percent cotton, and required breaking in. And something beautiful happens when this furiously stiff, unyielding fabric softens, not through chemical manipulation, but instead through time and heat and movement. When the indigo wash fades or becomes a brighter blue, when the sun bleaches the tops of the knees, when your hips press on the woven fabric until it stretches to accommodate them, then the jeans become yours.
You have subdued them.
And when you grow out of them, or get a motor oil stain on the back pocket, or bust through the knees, then you donate them to Goodwill. Someone else will benefit from your hard work. Someone with the same waist-to-hip ratio as you will put them on. Like stealing into an abandoned home. They will pay twelve dollars for your old Levi’s, and then the process of breaking-in and yielding continues anew. Though each round of yielding is less dramatic over time. Cotton can only stretch so much.
Of course, lots of denim brands besides Levi’s have 100% cotton jeans that will do the same thing. But the Levi’s branding is so original in the most literal sense that every other brand imitates them by default.
The five-pocket design is often replicated, but without the trademark stitching on the pockets or the little red or orange tab. (I am obsessed with orange tab Levi’s. OBSESSED!)
Lots of jeans have a leather patch on the back, but none bear the 160-year-old image of two horses trying and failing to pull a pair of pants apart. None of the other leather patches have a US Patent number.
No other item of clothing so potently symbolized freedom that the Soviets had to make them illegal. Nothing else says so clearly, I am American, and tough as hell, and you will never tear me apart.
Levi’s and the Longing For Belonging
The girls I worked with bought their Levis from boutiques in Pac Heights or the Inner Richmond. The kind of boutiques that smell like patchouli and lemongrass, festooned with macrame and hanging plants, with a stack of business cards for an astrologer by the checkout. Plate glass windows flood these spaces with the clear, clean, sheer light unique to San Francisco.
There you can buy vintage Levi’s that have been curated, organized by size, and lovingly refurbished. So goes the value proposition, anyway. And the jeans cost more there, because patchouli candles and clear, clean, sheer light are expensive. San Francisco’s rents are among the highest in the country. I could have walked to one of these boutiques after my shift and bought a pair, but I didn’t. A hundred dollars for a pair of pants was an extravagant expense for me at that time.
There was also just a belief I had, one that I couldn’t put down, that I didn’t deserve to go after the things I wanted. That if I wore a symbol on my clothing that said I am American, and tough as hell, and you will never tear me apart….
People would know I was lying.
My sense of shame must have been palpable, looking back on my time in the men’s clothing store. Which was silly, because I know now that for a 23 year old I was accomplished and worldly. I had studied abroad in London, and graduated with a bachelors degree in English. I had learned to water ski off the west coast of Ireland. I had acted on stage and had my poetry published in a literary magazine. I wasn’t cool, but I was gentle and sensitive and good at selling Palo Santo incense to members of the Hells Angels. I wasn’t as lame as I thought I was.
But I was so hyper-aware of the gap between who I currently was and who I wanted to be that I couldn’t ford the river. I loved classic cars, hot rods, and motorcycles, and was big into racing culture. But I wasn’t much of a drinker, and I didn’t smoke, and I was afraid of actually riding motorcycles myself. I liked the men who rode the motorcycles up to our store and tossed their sunkissed hair after removing their helmets. But if one of them smiled at me, I blushed all the way down to my toes and could barely talk to them. I was a spectator, and they were actually living the life that I wished I could. I didn’t even look the part.
Levi’s As A Symbol of an America That No Longer Exists
Levi’s 501s are wildly glamorous because they symbolize the very best American ideals: freedom, authenticity, daring, originality, innovation. (Say whatever you want about us, but who else could have invented spray cheese? Whomst? Fucking nobody, man! They can’t touch us!) They symbolize America itself—see my previous argument about the Soviets banning them.
Levi’s jeans also represent a specific ideal of equity, or perhaps national unity. Think about it. Levi’s 501s may have been created for miners. But now they are for everybody, and marketed as such.
You can wear them mucking out a stable, on an assembly line, tending bar, pouring concrete at a parking garage, teaching pre-school, or (as my dad did) designing and testing rocket ships. And as long as they fit right, they look good on everyone. Levi’s has always been a working-class, blue collar brand at heart. But the archetype they’ve created—the blue jean—is the uniform of daily life not just for blue collar workers, but for millions and millions of Americans. And has been for decades.
It’s rare that a product is both deeply utilitarian and ubiquitous, almost prosaic—and practically glowing with cultural significance.
There are so many other layers to Levi’s 501s, as is always the case when a product becomes a symbol. The process of dyeing denim damages rivers and oceans. Cotton takes a lot of water to produce, an average of a thousand gallons per pair of jeans (Levi’s has a program now to address this called Water-less that has saved, according to them, 13 billion liters of water). This is one of the reasons why vintage jeans have become so popular. Buying old things preserves the environment from the damage required to create new things.
There is also the narcotic sheen of nostalgia that is for once only partially an illusion. Some of it is real. Jeans really were better made thirty or forty years ago than they are now, with fast fashion flooding retailers with clothing that’s purpose-built to wear out after three washes. Until the 1990s, all Levi’s were made in America. They expanded into Mexico and Canada, and those jeans are of comparable quality, but the company stopped manufacturing in the US altogether in 2002 and now manufactures in China. Their jeans are usually made with at least two percent elastane, and I once bought a pair of new Levi’s only to have a rivet pop off the very first day I wore them. Cone Denim, which used to be a supplier for Levi’s and was the last denim mill in the US, closed in 2018. Its selvedge looms have recently been bought by an investor in North Carolina, who plans to bring them back into operation again. Before the closure, the mill had been running continuously for 110 years.
So when I look at a pair of 1970s Levi’s, they represent a bygone era in American life, a brief post-war period when it was possible to earn a respectable living without a college degree. When automation and outsourcing had yet to decimate the American middle and working classes. When the average American consumer still valued—and could actually recognize—craftsmanship. When was the last time you inspected a garment to assess how straight and even the seams are? Or how the hem has been finished? Or how the fabric feels in your hand?
When was the last time you bought clothing that did not have plastic in it?
I think about this stuff, but I’m a nut. Even still, I’ve bought cheap workout clothes on Amazon, I’m part of this. But I’d go so far as to say that most American consumers will gladly forfeit craftsmanship for convenience and a lower price. There’s a utilitarianism to our consumption habits now that frankly depresses me. Amazon and dupe culture are two manifestations of this. Nobody cares how something is made so long as they can get it fast. Nobody cares if they’re buying the original. And I know that part of this is wage stagnation, and rising housing costs, and we all have to make compromises somewhere. So I think the shift away from valuing craftsmanship largely isn’t conscious. It’s an adapation we’ve made because rent is 45% of our take-home pay.
My day job is for a company that sells a handcrafted product. But people are constantly offended by how much it costs to pay skilled workers a decent wage to build something out of real materials. You know, we don’t have that big of a margin and a major proportion of the sticker price is actually just labor and raw materials. But people leave comments on social media decrying how expensive the products are. They expect everything to be cheap, anodyne, and available immediately with 2 day returns. But the tradeoff for ultra-cheap consumer goods? You already know what it is, and you already know that it’s bad.
In the 20th century, the people who stitched Levi’s together, by and large, experienced a level of dignity and safety that most present-day garment workers do not. Manufacturing jobs are often really craftsmanship jobs and I think we need to see them that way. The people who make durable goods—clothes, shoes, furniture, area rugs, dinnerware—they are craftspeople.
Craftsmanship is artistry made practical. They tried to get rid of it during the Industrial Revolution, but it survived into the next century (thank you to my Arts and Crafts daddies John Ruskin and William Morris!). Then, at some point, we decided in America to systematically devalue the very discipline of craftsmanship itself. To the point where we considered it so beneath us that we outsourced it. (When I say “we” I mostly mean “corporations” but it would be facile to blame only them.)
I want this to change, of course, but I am just one person. I also know that I am not the first person to make literally any of these points! But they must be made!
Back to the heart of the matter
Anyway, back to the central preoccupation that inspired this essay: my fixation on not deserving vintage Levi’s. I was able to overcome that somehow, but not the limiting belief that inspired it. I’m still working through this old idea that if I want something, it will evade me. I’m sure this idea is there to keep me safe and stranded, in the words of Taylor Swift.
Listen, you guys, it’s terrifying to know what you really want. Fear and desire, as I always say, are fraternal twins. But when you keep avoiding being honest with yourself about the desires of your heart, you might end up plummeting into despair. And I think a lot of people are living with this awful sense of alienation from themselves. That’s why understanding the symbols of desire and projections of fantasy (AKA glamour) is important to me, and why I think it should be important to you.
I would posit that there’s a lot about yourself that you don’t know. You are a country that you can travel to at any time. But you tend to stick to the same five tourist traps time and time again instead of striking out towards those imposing-looking mountains. Glamour is just one way of discovering this new terrain.
During the early days of the pandemic, when it seemed like dying young was an emergent possibility for me, I got my first pair of vintage Levi’s 501s. I bought them online from Etsy, and I put them on with some trepidation. But they fit perfectly, except for the 35-inch inseam, which I would hem myself. They are blue like lapis lazuli, blue like the wind in winter, blue like the sunlight in San Francisco. I checked the care tag, and it had 0485 stamped on it, meaning the jeans were made in 1985.
But now they are mine.
They are mine.
And I am American, and tough as hell, and you will never tear me apart.