Christopher asked:

This is intended to be somewhat philosophical, since I haven't found the answer anywhere else: Why
are blue jeans blue? I'm not asking about the techniques for dyeing them blue. My question is rather
why do we want them blue? why (at least until very recently) do we want our jeans to be blue, in spite
of available technology to make them as good in any colour?

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This is not a philosophical question, sorry. My memory on details about jeans is vague now, but I'm
not going research this matter on your behalf. For as it happens blue jeans became just a fashion
craze a couple of decades ago, and they were originally the product of a maker whose factory was in
some French town that lent its name to the product [Serge de Nimes]. So your quest for a "deep"
meaning is in the same league as the "left wing politics" (why left wing? Because their originals sat on
the left side of the house of parliament); or "bernaise sauce" (from Bern) or "saxophone" (from
Adolphe Sax, its inventor) and innumerable other instances.

Jürgen Lawrenz

You might have a look at this site: http://www.designboom.com/eng/education/denim2.html.

Jeans were first worn by 18th century slaves and then by 19th century gold miners because the
material is tough, but the site says that blue was a good colour when frequent washing wasn't
possible.

In the 1950s blue jeans became a "symbol of teenage rebellion".

It might follow from this that older people want to wear blue jeans to express something about their
youthful personalities and non-conformity. Perhaps the general statement made by wearing blue
jeans, by the young and old, is that clothes washing isn't very important to them although this doesn't
seem likely since jeans are the easiest things to wash and normally don't have to be ironed.

But people probably want to wear blue jeans because they are uniform and classless and easy and
seem to go with everything. Blue jeans are worn by fashion models and builders, by the rich and
poor.

Not everyone wants all their pairs of jeans to be blue. I have a preference for black jeans in very cold
weather and white jeans in the summer. The problem with white jeans is that you look too white if you
wear a white t-shirt. They are limited in a way that blue and black are not. But black jeans are
perhaps not as uniform and classless as blue jeans because they are not as commonly available.

This can be considered to be philosophical question and perhaps it can be explained by Pierre
Bourdieu (Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement) who posits cultural communities — we
distinguish ourselves from others (the suited) and come to belong to a group of people who don't
want to be seen to be making too much effort by wearing easily available and easy to wash blue
jeans.

It is also of psychological interest. As a teenager, perhaps wishing to stand out, I had a pair of black
and pink stripy jeans which was probably an expression of a wish not to be considered ordinary or the
same as everyone else. Though oddly, this was at a traumatic period in family life and my mother
actually also had a pair of these jeans, but they were yellow and black. These jeans were quite
fashionable at the time, but not common. But the point is that not conforming in dress can express
emotional trauma. From experience I have noticed that when people are particularly traumatised they
do not conform to an expected dress code. I knew someone who was going through such a difficult
period emotionally that he could not buy a ready-made shirt and had to create his own shirt and send
it to a tailor to copy.

Rachel Browne

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