It’s in the jeans

Denim is the great American fabric. Like Coca-Cola and Big Macs, the Levi’s denim jeans grandad puts on to mow the lawn are the same as Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift wears in photo shoots. In jeans, we’re all equal.

Today, denim – from serge de Nimes, a tough cotton from Nimes in southern France – is the de facto material of the planet’s leisure trousers. But for its first 100 years, it was used in practical, hard-wearing garments designed for manual workers, most famously by Polish immigrant Levi Strauss, who imported it to San Francisco for his miners’ overalls in the 1860s.

Now a beautifully illustrated new photo book, Denim: The Fabric That Built America 1935-1944 by Graham Nash and Tony Nourmand, pays tribute to denim’s ‘golden age’ – when it clothed the country’s workers as they super-charged the economy after World War II.

These monochrome photographs are taken from the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information archive, and contain unforgettable images – many of which could have been taken at your local hipster cafe today. You’ll see cowboys – of course – but also female factory workers in double- and triple- denim, mechanics, lumberjacks and even a proto-DJ flicking through an album of acetate records wearing some smart overalls.

The pictures were taken by photographers like Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano and Russell Lee, who captured an aesthetic about to go from the workshops and farms of the midwest to the run-down estates and coffee bars of Britain and beyond – thanks to a combination of moves, television and rock ’n’ roll.

Eighty years on from the images you’ll find in this book, denim’s grip on fashion, music and film is as strong as ever. Seems like those good ol’ boys and girls were really onto something.

Denim: The Fabric That Built America 1935-1944