Cowboy Jeans
Far more than a pair of pants, the stuff of legend
The most-worn garment in the world hides a story almost no one knows
Blue jeans. Two syllables. Five billion pairs worn every day across the planet.
They belong to everyone and to no one in particular. The garment of children and presidents, of miners and rock stars, of competitive riders and Sunday strollers. We wear them without a thought. We have always worn them. We have long since stopped asking why.
And yet, behind this blue cloth you know so well lie stories you have never heard. Two European cities whose names crossed the Atlantic, hidden inside two words: denim and jean, the cloth and the garment. Immigrants who invented it all and whom history has all but forgotten. Cowboys who demanded, seam after seam, that someone finally make them the pants they actually needed, not the ones they were being offered. And, over it all, a jacket cut from the same blue cloth, lined with a blanket to hold off the chill of an early ranch morning.
Blue jeans were not born in the American West. They were transformed there.
It is that transformation (slow, exacting, dictated by the realities of the ranch and the arena) that this series traces: from the cotton field to stages the world over, from cloth to garment, from the riveted pants to the cowboy's jacket.
