Designer Jeans

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

Jeans Sold as Status

The defining move of designer jeans is in the definition itself: jeans marketed as fashion and status symbols, rather than as work clothing or basics. The garment did not change category — it remained denim jeans — but its selling point changed from durability to the name on it. That is why the typical features listed are about display: prominently visible designer names or logos on the back pockets and on the right front coin pocket, where other people can read them, and cuts often worn skin-tight, made for women first and then for men. Within a few years of the Jordache launch in 1978, dozens of other brands were on the market, among them Sergio Valente, Sasson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Chic, Calvin Klein, Bonjour and Guess?. The back pocket became advertising space that the wearer carried.

Advertising That Made the Category

Racy, suggestive advertisements promoted many of the brands, and the campaigns are part of the definition because they did the category's work. The first Jordache commercials, with the You've Got The Look campaign, were rejected by the networks as lewd and were carried only by independent television stations in New York — a rejection that itself signalled the product's positioning. Gloria Vanderbilt advertised her jeans as a million-dollar look, and Brooke Shields posed in Calvin Kleins with the line about nothing coming between her and her Calvins. Each campaign sold the logo's meaning rather than the denim's construction: a shopper was buying the association the advertisement had built, in jeans cut first for women, with men's lines following the women's in overall appearance — the reverse of the usual direction, in which women's fashions had earlier followed men's, as with flared and bell-bottomed trousers.

Decline and the Premium Return

In the late 1980s designer jeans lost popularity, and the definition records a second wave rather than a simple revival. As of 2005 they were coming back into fashion with brands such as Seven for All Mankind, True Religion, Rock & Republic and MR Jeans, typically costing upwards of $200 — a price that makes the status function explicit, since it cannot be explained by the denim alone. A few of the older brands, namely Jordache, Sergio Valente and Calvin Klein, were also coming back with the designs that made them popular. The category therefore runs in cycles driven by the same mechanism in both waves: a name made visible on a basic garment, promoted heavily, priced as a symbol — falling when the symbol fades and returning when a new set of names rebuilds it.