Joe Bennett: To pull on an old familiar battered pair of jeans is to know a comfort in a spiky world

American actor Marlon Brando was a heart-throb who wore blue jeans and helped the denim industry thrive. Photo / Getty

OPINION

Weaving is one of the great civilising inventions. Without it, we’d still be wearing animal skins. So let’s weave.

First, attach a warp of strong blue cotton thread to your loom. Then make a weft of white cotton thread. As you weave, be sure to pass the weft under two or more warp threads at a time, to create a cloth whose topside is more blue than white and whose underside is more white than blue. Keep at it for a while and you’ll end up with a global industry worth $60 billion a year. That industry is denim.

Denim derives from Serge de Nimes, a coarse cloth from the southern French city of that name. The word jeans derives from Genoa Fustian, a similar cloth from northern Italy that was used to make work trousers. So both jeans and denim have been with us for a couple of hundred years or so, but the $60b industry is a more recent thing.

My father died in 1973. He never owned or contemplated owning a pair of jeans. He would have found the idea indecent. Yet all three of his sons have worn jeans throughout their lives and thought nothing of it.

My father was born during World War I and was a teenager during the Depression. Or rather, he wasn’t, teenagers having not yet been invented. There was talk only of ‘an awkward age’, and then suddenly you were grown up. And almost as suddenly married and a parent.

The idea of the teenager emerged from American post-war affluence. It was to be found in literature such as Catcher in the Rye, where the implausible Holden Caulfield spends 200 pages seeing through the phoniness of adult life. More influentially, it was enshrined on film by Marlon Brando and James Dean. Both were heart-throbs. Both wore blue denim jeans. The industry was born.

To the world at large, jeans became an emblem not only of youth and of rebellion, but also of Western freedoms. In the Soviet Union, there was a vast and lucrative black market for Levi’s.

By the early 1970s, when I was starting to have an independent social life, by which I mean drinking, I owned only three types of trousers: trousers for school, trousers for cricket, and jeans. To wear anything other than jeans to the pub was unthinkable.

What started as a male thing rapidly became unisexual, though girls, being differently shaped, wore jeans differently. Alison Walls, who was forthright, told me that to do up her jeans on a Saturday evening, she would lie back on the bed, hook a coat hanger through the zip and haul. I asked how she went to the toilet when out and about. She didn’t, she said.

So jeans blossomed by being emblematic of youth, glamour and American prosperity. But then why should I, who is neither youthful, nor glamorous, nor any sort of fan of things American, have just this afternoon bought two pairs? Is it conditioning? Is it a last doomed effort to recapture youth? Am I shaking a fist at the passage of time?

I’d like to think not. Jeans are just good trousers. Forget their symbolism. They’re durable and practical. And cheap. Mine, from a cut-price chain store, were 30 bucks a pair.

More importantly, and perhaps uniquely among garments, jeans get better with age. A stain does not disfigure them, nor yet a tear or a hole or a patch. So much so, in fact, that the shops are full of distressed jeans, new garments that have been deliberately torn, repaired or faded to look old, like fake antiques.

But you can’t fake true ownership. An old pair of jeans is like a friend. When you take them off at night and drop them on the floor - jeans must never be hung or ironed or folded - they do not lie quite flat. They retain something of your shape. Time has tailored them. You don’t so much take them off as moult them. They are as utterly yours as shoes are. To pull on an old familiar battered pair of jeans is to know a comfort in a spiky world, to feel at one with what you’re wearing. I suspect it was once the same way with animal skins. Jeans are good.