Nîmes, Genoa, and Indigo:
The Origins of Denim

A Cloth Born in Europe, Overlooked in America

Here is one of the most delicious ironies in the history of clothing: the fabric that would become the emblem of the American West was born in Europe, in two Mediterranean cities most jeans-wearers don't even know exist. One lies in the Languedoc region of France. The other on the Ligurian coast of Italy. Their names (Nîmes and Genoa) crossed the Atlantic tucked inside two small words, one of four letters and one of five: jean and denim.

Genoa: The Cloth of Seafarers

Before the word "jean" meant a pair of pants, it meant a fabric. A tough cotton cloth (a fustian) produced in the port of Genoa and used from the 16th century on by the sailors and dockworkers of the great Ligurian merchant city.

The Genoese navy outfitted its sailors in garments cut from this cloth precisely because it could be worn wet or dry without losing its shape. Hard-wearing, cheap, and available in quantity, it was equally suited to making sails, protecting cargo on board, and sewing nearly indestructible work pants. In Genoa, the cloth was dyed with indigo, which gave it its characteristic blue. It was known as bleu de Gênes, Genoa blue.

Exported across Europe, Genoese cloth turns up in English trade records as early as 1576, when a shipment of jean fustians entered the port of Barnstaple, in England, aboard a vessel out of Bristol. A 1577 inventory drawn up in Richmond by Thomas Pasmore already lists two yards (about 1.8 meters) of whitt jeane: white Genoa cloth. In 1578, a list of goods distinguishes fustians by their place of origin: jeanes fustian for those from Genoa, side by side with cloths from Naples and Ulm.

The word jean, then, is not American. It is Genoese, come down to us by way of French.

The most telling example of all is Giuseppe Garibaldi himself: the general and hero of Italian unification wore a pair of pants made of Genoese cloth when he landed at Marsala, in Sicily, in 1860. Those pants are preserved today at the Central Museum of the Risorgimento in Rome, Italy, housed in the Vittoriano monument: silent proof that the jean predates America by several centuries.

Indigo: The Blue Gold That Colored Everything

Without indigo, there would be no blue jean. No denim as we know it.

Indigo is one of humankind's oldest dyes: its use goes back at least 6,000 years, attested by textile fragments unearthed at archaeological digs in Peru. Extracted from the fermented leaves of Indigofera tinctoria, a plant native to South Asia, it yields a deep, stable blue that medieval European dyers tried to reproduce with their own local resource: woad (Isatis tinctoria). Woad gave a paler, less colorfast blue, but for centuries it was the only option available in Europe.

Everything changed in 1498, when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama opened the sea route to India, making the import of Asian indigo direct and regular. Indigo then poured into Europe, and the woad growers fought back hard: they branded the new dye the "devil's dye" and had it banned in several countries. In France, that ban would not be lifted until 1737, after an aristocracy obsessed with deep blues had made the prohibition all but unenforceable.

That is not the only dark chapter in indigo's history. In Bengal, in the mid-19th century, British colonists forced Indian peasants to grow indigo at the expense of food crops, saddling them with debt and paying them paltry prices. In 1859–1860, those peasants rose up in what became known as the Indigo Revolt: an episode long overlooked, but one that shows the blue of our jeans came at a human cost of its own.

The Industrial Revolution put an end to all this by another means: in 1878, the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer identified the chemical structure of indigo. In 1897, the firms BASF and Hoechst launched commercial production of synthetic indigo. By 1914, 95% of the world's natural indigo production had disappeared. Today, very nearly all of the world's denim is dyed with synthetic indigo.

Nîmes: The Accident That Made Denim

At the very moment Genoa was exporting its bleu de Gênes across Europe, the weavers of Nîmes were trying to reproduce the Genoese cloth that was selling so well. They never managed it, but by accident they created something different, and tougher.

Cloth from Nîmes had been produced in the region since 1557. Back then it was woven from wool and silk from the neighboring Cévennes: a popular, sturdy, reusable fabric. Trade in this cloth made the fortune of one of the city's leading Protestant families: the André family, whose 17th-century patriarch, Joseph André, traded Serge de Nîmes throughout Europe, opening trading posts as far away as Genoa itself.

What the Nîmes weavers produced was technically distinct from the Genoese fabric. Serge de Nîmes is a twill: its warp threads are dyed indigo blue while the weft threads are left undyed, giving the cloth a blue face and a much lighter reverse, recognizable at a glance. The Genoese cloth, by contrast, used threads of the same color in both warp and weft. This seemingly minor detail of manufacture is precisely what sets denim apart from the original jean.

The word "denim" comes from that contraction: de Nîmes → denim.

In short, denim and jean were at first two different fabrics: jean, the cloth from Genoa, with threads of a single color in warp and weft alike, smooth and supple; denim, the Serge de Nîmes, a twill with an indigo warp and an undyed weft, hence blue on the face and light on the reverse. Common usage has since simplified all of this: today, denim refers to the fabric, and jean to the garment cut from it. To speak of "a pair of denim jeans," then, is to name in a single breath both the garment and the cloth it is made from.

In 1685, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV forced thousands of French Protestants to flee the country. Weavers, craftsmen, merchants (including the André family itself, which took refuge in Genoa) carried their know-how with them to England, the Dutch Republic, Italy, and even America. In doing so, they helped spread the Nîmes weaving technique far beyond its birthplace.

The Atlantic Crossing

Denim reached American soil with the European colonists. As early as 1792, the manual The Weavers Draft Book and Clothiers Assistant described the weaving techniques of the denims produced in the new mills of New England.

That is where the American chapter of the fabric's story was written. In 1831, in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was founded, destined to become the largest cotton-denim production center in the Americas. At its peak, the mill employed nearly 17,000 people, most of them immigrants, women, and children from Ireland, Greece, Poland, and Germany. Its 23,000 looms turned out roughly five million yards (4.5 million meters) of cloth every week.

In 1873 (the year of the patent that would change everything) Amoskeag became the principal denim supplier to Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, California. It was from this New England cloth, a direct descendant of Serge de Nîmes, that the first riveted pants would be cut. The mill would supply Levi's jeans exclusively until 1915–1916, before handing off to the Cone Mills, whose red-selvedge denim, created specifically for the 501 model in 1927, is a benchmark today for raw-denim enthusiasts.

The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company would close its doors on December 24, 1935, a casualty of the Great Depression. In its time, it had laid the industrial foundations of the American jean.