Apple Bottoms Women's Fashion Brand

"Apples come in all shapes and sizes" is the cute tagline for Apple Bottoms, the pioneering women's fashion line. The brand's premise is in that line: named to celebrate the appeal of a woman's "apple bottom," the brand's signature Apple Bottom jeans are designed to ensure the wearer's beautiful curves are accentuated, as they should be. At a time when premium denim mostly meant a unisex cut in smaller sizes, a jeans label designed explicitly around women's curves was a genuine point of difference.

Apple Bottoms is a fashion brand for women launched in 2003 by rap artist Nelly, Yomi Martin and Ian Kelly. The brand was initially a denim label, but has since expanded to include other women's and girls' clothing, perfume and accessories. The signature apple pocket of the jeans has become a logo that transcends beyond just the denim collection - the apple mark doing for this label what a famous pocket stitch does for older jeans brands.

A Denim Label That Grew

The expansion path the profile recorded - denim first, then clothing, perfume and accessories - is the classic celebrity-brand arc of its decade, but the order matters: Apple Bottoms began with a product that had to fit to work, not with a logo looking for merchandise. The jeans carried the brand, and everything else followed the customer the jeans created. Girls' clothing extended the same idea down an age range, in the period's matching-outfits fashion.

One piece of shopping information and a joke are both worth keeping. As of 2012, Apple Bottoms were sold through the website DrJays.com. And no - the profile is explicit - this is not relevant to the Fruit of the Loom brand, the other apple in the directory, whose own women's brand page sits under F in this directory and is linked from this one. Two apples, two entirely different orchards.

Buying Apple Bottoms Jeans

Fit is the brand, so fit is the test. The signature jeans were designed to accentuate curves: the waist should sit without gaping at the back - the classic failure of straight-cut jeans on a curvy figure, and the exact problem this label set out to solve - while the apple pocket placement should sit where the design intends, centred on the cheek. If the pocket drifts, the size is wrong, however comfortable the waistband feels.

Most Apple Bottoms now trades secondhand, so check stretch recovery in denim with elastane (bagged knees and a sagging seat do not recover), pocket embroidery for loose threads, and perfume or storage odour in unworn old stock. Period denim sizing runs small against today's vanity sizing - buy by waist measurement. Washed cool and dried away from heat, the jeans keep both their shape and their point: clothes designed to celebrate the figure wearing them.