Why we still can’t get enough of denim
Over sixty, and wearing denim. We still look good in jeans. Or we think we do. In 2017, denim jeans are part of practically everyone’s apparel. For the over-60s, the denim jeans we still wear reflect a part of our lives. Jeans are like a statement of more than fashion.
Originally, denim jeans in the USA represented cowboys, and the Wild West. Then came Marlon Brando in The Wild One, in his jeans. In the swinging sixties, the American college students, and teens around the globe, started wearing blue jeans as a symbol of solidarity with youth, with anti-discrimination, and with anti-drafting for the troops battling in Vietnam. Women could wear jeans to embrace equality. Our singers in bands used to wear denim jeans. Their music was all our own.
We all still love our jeans. Denim fits us, wears well, and each pair of jeans fades in its own unique way. Some of us have adopted fleecy tracksuits along the way, for total comfort. But for street wear, denim jeans are an evergreen popular choice.
So what has survived the swinging sixties? Our youth has gone, our music consists of aging pop stars, such as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Silent Spring is even more silent, and Vietnam is only a story to the modern children. Revolutionary free love has disappeared in a cloud of AIDS and STD’s. The millennial generations regard us as genial Neanderthal doshbags.
But the denim still survives. Trends may come, and fads may go, but the denim is as popular as ever. We are now the aging baby boomers, over-60 relics of the swinging sixties, when we were growing up into a new world.
We still look good in our jeans, or think we do. Was it really all about the denim?
*Image is a stock photo and not of Barbara Binland.