Jeans: What's the Cost?

Growing up my dad wore jeans every day - in fact, he still does. Jeans are his uniform. He has his weekend work jeans, his work jeans and his going out jeans, all with different levels of wear. It is well known in our family that Hunter McCaig only wears jeans. I watched my dad wear this garment until they would fall apart, then my step-mom would stitch them back up and he would wear them again. It instilled in my mind how durable jeans can be and when they do get holes, you patch them up and wear them again. I saw how jeans would stay in his closet for years, which is what we should expect from our clothing.

As I started thrifting, jeans were the garment that helped me see how women were being short changed by the fast fashion industry. When I would go second-hand hunting for jeans, I was always disappointed by the women’s section. These jeans were made from thin, spandex fabric that were always ill fitting, and were designed to fall apart at the seams. When I would head to the men’s section, I found beautiful jeans, made with strong durable cotton twill, with FULL sized pockets. Rather than settle for the fast fashion brands I would shop in the men’s section and I learned how to alter them to fit my waist, again this garment showed me how durable and long lasting it could be, if designed with thought.

Jeans have a long history that span the globe; they speak to people of any age, race, size or background. Most humans can attest to at least owning one pair of jeans in their lifetime. Although this garment is often seen as humble, fashionable and even democratic, its history is shrouded in capitalism. Despite the fact that the first jean style was patented in 1873, its original components have been around for centuries and are deeply rooted in the darkest part of our worlds history; slavery.

Indigo is a part of our daily lives, it is in all of our wardrobes, but before it was produced in abundance by enslaved people, the Indigofera Tinctoria plant was used to dye the clothing of royalty and help show their status. It was first grown in Charleston in the 1700’s, when landowners discovered it would grow in areas not suitable for rice, it also acted as a rotation crop in between rice plantings, allowing the crop year to be extended by getting more use out of their land and enslaved. “Slavery wasn’t even legal in Georgia until indigo became the main export in South Carolina, the [British] governors in Georgia decided to legalize slavery to keep the indigo industry going.”¹ Profit over human life or environmental cost is the basis for any capitalist endeavour, no more so documented than during America Slavery. The indigo industry was often run completely by enslaved people because of their knowledge of how to grow and harvest the plant, yet their lives were traded for this currency, “it was used literally as currency and they were trading one length of cotton in exchange for one human body.”^{2 3} 

Cotton is a part of our daily lives, it is in all of our wardrobes, sound familiar? While you might not have known the links between indigo production and slavery, the tie between cotton and slavery are well documented. Although cotton has been grown for 7000+ years, it was the trading of this product that pushed its growth to America in the 15^th century, subsequently cotton replaced indigo as the key crop in America’ South by the 1800’s. “By 1787 Delegates at the Constitutional Convention were split on the question of human bondage and man’s inhumanity to man, but not its economic necessity. At the time, there were nearly 700,000 enslaved people living in the US, worth an estimated $210 million in today’s dollars.”⁴  Karl Marx’s brutal, but accurate quote “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry” truly captures how human life can be viewed as a commodity, just like machinery.³   We may think that that era is done, that our jeans are no longer made by enslaved people, but that is not true. With the design of jeans and they're growth in pop culture, fast fashion jumped on this bandwagon and continues to pump out more styles than we even want.