Ideas - Blue jeans have a dark secret

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Jeans are a quintessential fashion staple for the Canadian tuxedo — and a symbol of rebellion. But the world's most popular garment comes at an environmental cost. It takes around 7,500 litres of water to make a single pair of jeans. And that's not all. Fashion expert Pedro Mendes explores the 150-year history of jeans and the 'authenticity' they are supposed to represent. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 13, 2019.Read: How jeans became one of the most polluting garments in the world

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Ideas. Ideas. Radio for the mind. On any given day, over half the world's population is in jeans. I'm Nala Ayyed. Welcome to Ideas. To me,

genes represent an American dream about fashion. That it's democratic, that it This is what summer basketball sounds like in Canada. The Canadian elite basketball League is back, bringing 10 teams, exceptional talent, and non-stop energy all season long.

And here's the best part. Every regular season game is live on CBC Gem with featured games on CBC television. The future of the game is here. Don't miss the action. Watch the C-EBL all season on CBC and CBC Gem. It's accessible, that it's casual and fun and cool. genes they fade and they move and they twist and they become you. You probably own a pair of jeans or two, maybe more.

How many pairs of jeans do you currently have? At the moment, we are approximately thinking about 8,000 pair of jeans and 6,000 denim jackets approximately. Whether you own a pair or even thousands, there's more behind the ubiquitous fashion staple than meets the eye. Genes have had such potent social meaning and have been used and adopted by different cultural and social groups with different meanings across history. But that global spread of genes comes at a cost. In the past couple of decades, genes have fallen into the trap of fast fashion. They're becoming cheaper. They're becoming throwaway. They really represent to me a microcosm of the larger forces that are.

at work in the fashion industry. In other words, jeans have become a problem, a problem that isn't necessarily front of mind when looking for that perfect pair. I know the kids wear their jeans very low. I do not wear my pants very low. I wear them a bit higher. So I would call this a mid-rise to the younger generation.

It's a high-rise, but yeah. Ideas contributor and men's fashion expert, Pedro Mendez, explores the social and cultural history of denim jeans, and what our obsession with them means for us today. Hey, Ben, how's it going? It's going well. How are you? Thank you. Down into the basement.

Oh, my God, there's a lot of equipment down here. Safe to say at least 99% of people buy their jeans off the rack at a chain store or at a mall. I'm doing my gene shopping a bit differently here. So the material is woven at around 13.5 ounce, but it's unsanferized. So if we wash it, it shrinks. Ben via Piana makes custom jeans in Toronto. Okay, so how do we get started? What's the first step? First step would be kind of deciding on if you want like the color and then the weight of the material.

I think pretty standard, like darker blue with, you know, standard fit or whatever, like standard features that we would consider sort of classic. All right, yeah. So, I mean, I have two separate books here. One is all the blue denims and one is the sort of colored or mixed tones of denims. Ben has worn and loved jeans for as long as he can remember. He even calls them his second skin. He started making them for himself when he was a teenager. So I like this one.

It has a nice deep, deep blue color. It's actually natural indigo this one. Oh, it's natural indigo, nice, 100% cotton. So I pick the denim, and next up are the details, the thread, the rivets, and the buttons. I like to choose them together just because that way you kind of get to see, like, if you want like a red thread, that might not go well with a copper rivet. And then, you know, some people can't picture it. But yeah, I do.

We'll pick the thread color usually and then kind of go and mix buttons or even. It's depending on how classic you want the jeans to look. I like just classic, which I assume is sort of like an orangey yellow. Yeah, I mean the, if we're going to go super far back, like 100 years ago back, it's, whatever thread was in the machine. The waistband machine worked best with that exact, you know, off-white color of whatever. That's what it was. Now, you have a huge variety of rivets and buttons and snaps. They all look vaguely familiar because, of course, I've seen jeans before. But, like, yeah, there's like silver and there's like two-tone and kind of bronze and gold. I guess

bronze is the classic. The most sort of, again, bring it back to the big one, Levi's, you know, they were always known to use like sort of a silver button and then copper rivets. Yeah. Okay, yep, yeah, let's do that. That's cool. Perfect. And then what's next? Labels. So I have a bunch of labels to choose from. Okay, so these are the, this is the little leather sort of patch that goes on the back of your jeans that has your logo on it. Correct.

And you don't even have to put one on if you don't want to, but I mean, jeans are jeans with that, you know? Exactly. It's like that, that look, that sort of iconic look, you need to have that little, just that little spot of, in my opinion, like a, medium brown leather kind of says it. So that's done. And then next step is me measuring you, I guess, you know? Where do you want me to go? Right in the middle. Right in the middle right there.

Just stand right here. Okay, you got your tape measure. What do I do here? Just raise my arms. All of those details, Ben, is building into my jeans. The weight and weave of the fabric, the placement of the rivets, that leather patch on the back. That whole look goes back about 150 years.

Denim, jeans have a very long history, but I think that the modern blue gene, as we know it, as we recognize it out on the streets, was absolutely a creation of Levi Strauss in the late 19th century. My name is Emma McClendon. I'm the associate curator of costume at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. And while Levi Strauss is often credited as the inventor of blue jeans, he didn't do it on his own. Levi Strauss didn't actually come up with the idea for jeans. He was approached by a tailor named Jacob Davis who had made one of these pairs of jeans out of denim. He had bought at the Levi Strauss store. He put metal rivets in it. And he had found that these were really durable, really great work pants.

These were meant to be durable garments that you could wear on the mines out in the field. building the railways. And so you needed to have tools with you. You needed to be able to put lots of stuff in your pockets and take it out. And there was a lot of wear and tear at certain stress points, like where the pockets connect to the pants or where you might hang a pick from a loop. These were places that the pants were most likely to tear. They were most likely to rip. And so what Levi's was really promoting or what they became known for with these riveted pants were these reinforced, highly durable trousers that wasn't just the textile. It was also about how they were made with these metal reinforcements to keep them from falling apart. And roughly when

are we talking? Is there sort of a year? So 1873 is the year that they patented these jeans. And so both of their names are actually on the patent. So that's both Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis. As a society, we wear almost no clothing now that we wore, especially in the West, in 1873, except for jeans. But how similar are like the standard genes today to that very first pair? It depends on what jeans you're talking about. The 501s, a style you can still go out and buy in the store, technically speaking,

are very, very close to what was being sold in the late 19th century at Levy's. The first style of these genes that they offered were called the double X style, which then became the 501. It was later renamed. So essentially, it is the same model. Well, I've heard, I've also heard another difference is that there actually used to be a rivet right, how shall I put this delicately? Oh, at the base of the fly.

Thank you. At the base of the fly. And there's this story that somebody was standing too close to a fire and the rivet heated up. Yes, that is one. Jeans have so many myths and kind of urban legends about them. And that is one of my favorites that's out there. And I would love to think that that's true. But what actually happened is that the rivet at the rivet at the,

the base of the fly went away during World War II because there was rationing. That's right. Rationing was so tight during the war that even that tiny bit of copper had to be accounted for. In researching her book, Denham Fashion's Frontier, Emma immersed herself in the archives of the Levi-Strauss Museum in San Francisco. What actually I think was most surprising wasn't necessarily always the genes themselves, but a kind of gem of the Levi's archive is that they have advertisements kind of going back to the very beginning of the Levi's company and Levi's selling of jeans. And it was really interesting to see how they marketed genes. The slogans they would use for them, the catchphrases,

the illustrations or photographs that would appear in the ads, and how that changed over time. And so even while the genes themselves might not be so different that the way their social positioning, the way that they were being marketed, the way they were being sold, that changed exponentially over 100 years. The most famous of those ads can still be seen today on the back of Levi's jeans. It's two horses that are rigged up to a pair of jeans in the middle of the, them and the horses are trying to pull the jeans apart. The horses are going in opposite directions. So basically, that sort of tells you what the gist was of these ads.

It's all about how durable they are, how good they are as tough workwear. It wasn't until the 1920s that Levi's marketing began to turn in another direction. That's when you start to see the first ads that move away from jeans as well. workwear only to being jeans as cowboy wear. I'm going up in the COVID's neighborhood and try to locate that stuff. You have every hand on the ranch ready when I come back. No matter what anybody says, we're all going after what belongs to us. Cowboys and the Hollywood Western are incredibly significant for the shift from genes just being

about workwear to genes. being cool. But what's actually more important is the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s, because that is the time when, you know, Hollywood is really coming into its own. It's coming into its golden age. And the Hollywood Western is a key genre in that development. And John Wayne, all these cowboy kind of heroes, wear jeans. Did actual cowboys wear jeans? Well, not necessarily. You know, that's the thing is that the people who are wearing jeans were much more hard laborers.

The real guys who were working as ranch hands or who were out in the wilderness, they weren't necessarily going to wear jeans. They might. Some of them probably did, but they also would have worn a canvas. But do you get the sense, because again, this is what happens a lot today, do you get the sense that when we're talking in the 1920s and 30s with, with Hollywood and the vision of cowboys and jeans, was there an authenticity that they were trying to sell? I think so. But I think that they were definitely thinking about jeans and Levi's as a kind of, you know, rugged Western garment

that they would outfit the cowboys in or the actors in to portray cowboys, to lend it some sort of authenticity. association with a kind of Western aesthetic. But it wasn't just Levi's behind this 1920s boom in the fashion of blue jeans. In 1923, Levi's 50-year patent ran out, which meant new companies, like Lee, could now take the classic design and run with it. In the 20s, Lee capitalized on this new pre-srunked denim. It was called samperized, I think, denim.

Yes, yeah. And they advertised on all of these kind of one-on-one cowboy pant ads where they were talking about all the benefits. They would say pre-shrunkin for your comfort and they would have this kind of because all of these ads are illustrations. They're not photographs. So they would have a little kind of cartoon-like character trying to get on these shrunken jeans and having a terrible time. And then there was the, you know, very handsome cowboy in his lees who was very. kind of easily, suavely sort of moving around the ranch in his pre-shrunken jeans. Do you get the sense, though, that these were being targeted to and purchased by actual

cowboys or people who wanted to feel like cowboys? I definitely think it's both. But I think there's a huge market at this point to kind of broaden beyond the people who would wear these in a functional manner to people who were not actually cowboys. who were not actually working in these different areas or even living in these geographic locations and expanded out to a broader consumer base. That new customer base included a population

that had never worn jeans before. Levi's broadened its product offering in the 30s to include women with their lady Levi's. And ladies levies were essentially looked a lot like the 501. You know, they even had their cinch backstrap and all of these kind of details that the, earlier 501s had, but they had a higher rise, so they were higher waisted, and they tapered a bit at the waist, so they kind of had a slightly curvier shape to them, if you will. And they

marketed these as, again, not just to women who would have worn these on ranches or in more kind of rugged settings, they also appeared in vogue as the outfit that you should wear on your dude ranch vacation. So this is not, yeah, this is, so this was not something, uh, counterculture or no, you know, outside. Not at all. This was not counterculture at all. This was a romantic mythology of the wild west. And so that's the, you know, outside. And so that's the, the context in which Levis are discussed in vogue, and they're telling fashionable women how to dress when they go to the dude ranch. And the absolute must is that you have to have your denim jeans. And you should pair your jeans with boots, a Stetson hat, and a cable-knit sweater, and a scarf, a neckerchief, if you will.

So it's sort of like a fashionable version of that cowboy costume that we still recognize today with the cowboy hat, the jeans, the bandana, the whole bit. After World War II, jeans took another turn from the wholesome Back to the Land cowboy to the symbol of rebellion. They get this rebellion connotation after the war from a lot of different directions. But again, it's largely linked to Holly. and Hollywood's portrayal of biker gangs. None of these outlaw outfits that don't want to do anything but foul things up for everybody else.

Hey, what kind of outfits? Say that again. Outlaw outfits like yours. Okay, square. Right now. You want to drag Johnny here 100 yards for beers or your chicken? The biker rebel after the war, again, is one of these figures that absolutely had an origin and had real examples of biker gangs and biker rebels that were going around after the war. But it got blown out of proportion to a massive degree. And this image of the biker rebel was actually in some ways,

update of the cowboy archetype. Instead of the suede, fringed, you know, stereotypical cowboy jacket, they wore black leather perfecto jackets. And instead of a horse, they had a Harley, you know, and instead of their Stetson, they had a black leather hat like Marlon Brando wore or they had their motorcycle hat. It was the anti-heroes, the guys who wore their jeans with black leather motorcycle jackets and engineer boots and white t-shirts and had the long, greasy hair worn in the DA, and that sort of thing. That's G. Bruce Boyer. He's been a menswear writer and editor for over 40 years. and he was there in the 1950s as a teenager when the whole rebel-style jeans thing started.

What we're talking about when we talk about the urban rebel look is really what I think of as proletarian gear. The clothes came from the bottom of society, and this is all very interesting for students of costumes. for example, because throughout the whole history of mankind, styles and things always started at the top and then filtered down. But after World War II, the styles actually rose up from the bottom, this prole gear. They wore workers' clothes. For example, the Beat Generation, guys like Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and their friends and so forth, they were working. wearing iconic American things. From the very beginning, jeans were consciously seen as being symbolic, symbolic of a way

of life, symbolic of a type of person, symbolic of a certain masculinity, and none of it was completely authentic. I mean, it's funny, in the 1950s. young guys like me, we thought there was a certain authenticity to Brando and James Dean and Montgomery Cliff and Paul Newman wearing that kind of stuff. But of course, it was as much symbol as it was anything because it was a pose. When you were doing it, when it was the late 50s and you were a teenager and you were wearing the rebel style, Were you consciously like flipping the bird at the man by wearing jeans? I think it was a style because I've always been very conscious of clothing as style,

as symbolic of representing something in the world that I admired. I just thought it was an incredibly cool look, but it did to a young guy. it connoted, I think, a sense of freedom in a culture that we made ourselves. You know, we made our own music. We made our cars, you know, because of the detailing and so forth. We made our own clothes. We made our own dances, you know, which were completely different from that of our parents and so forth. We spoke our own language.

When you were wearing jeans, were you a Levi's guy? Were you a Wrangler guy? Were you a Lee guy? Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that because you're perfectly right to mention those three. There were only three jeans makers in the 50s, Levi's, Ranglers, and Lee, as you said. And you could tell a great deal about a guy by. which brand he wore. You know, it's just like you could tell a lot about a guy by the necktie he wore or, you know, whatever it is.

I mean, these things can reveal character and affiliation. You know, it's part of a uniform. And uniforms have that dual function of keeping people in the group and keeping others out of the group. Bruce remembers that Wrangler jeans were for the guys into the country Western look. Levi's were for the Brando Rebel-style wannabes, and Lees were kind of both, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. So you'd pick your brand based on the group you wanted to be associated with. Bruce was a Levi's guy.

Did you do anything to them? Like, did you distress them? Yes, we did. Because you're too young to have had the pleasure of going into an Army and Navy store or something and looking at a pile of new jeans. The interesting thing about indigo dye is that it makes the cotton incredibly stiff. The color, of course, comes off.

I mean, if you grab a bunch of jeans out of the pile and you try them on and so forth, you're going to end up with blue hands. And thirdly, there's a distinctive smell. Oh, really? To indigo. If you smell new jeans, there's a distinctive smell to them. Well, all of these things didn't play well, you know, when you wanted to wear them.

So most guys would wash the jeans a couple of times. It was said that some guys actually would put the new jeans on and fill up the bathtub with water and sit in it for a couple of hours until the jeans shrunk down. and loosened up and so forth. But you never did that? I never did it because I was smart enough to understand that the indigo would color the bathtub blue. And I didn't want to have to scrub out that bathtub. So the work that you did on your own jeans

was mostly just washing them? Just washing it. Yeah, just wash them down a couple of times. There was really no such thing as distressing in those days beyond that point. We would have never thought of sandpapering, number, stonewashing, number, acid bleaching, number anything. It was just you washed them down a couple of times, and that took the stiffness and some of the smell out of it. You're listening to a documentary called The Problem with Genes on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on RN and around the world.

at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also download ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Over the course of roughly 150 years, denim jeans have evolved from sensible workwear

to a symbol of the lone cowboy to the uniform for rebels without a cause. And now jeans are the most popular garment in the world. Ideas contributor Pedro Mendez continues his exploration into the evolution of genes by looking at what they came to represent

during the civil rights movement. He's in conversation with menswear expert, G. Bruce Boyer. We intend to win this fight with love and by the weapon of protest using the method of passive resistance. The other thing I want to ask you about is the connection between the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s and genes.

When the civil rights movement came along, the people who went south, the young people on freedom marches and so forth, and the people who are already in the south working to register voters, they understood very clearly that they had to have a rapport with these people. You really couldn't go into... the fields of Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and register people to vote. If you were wearing an Ivy League suit and a button-down shirt, they certainly were not going to sign up to vote with you. So you had to symbolize that you were one of them. Did the symbolizing

work in the other direction as well? What I mean is, in terms of I've heard about marches, civil rights marches where African Americans are wearing the overall, the denim overalls, to essentially make the white audience nervous because it is a symbol of slavery. It is a symbol of that time.

I think it was to show the humbleness and the peasant quality of the thing. You know, Martin Luther King's casket was carried on an old sharecropper wagon to the grave. I think they wanted very consciously to make the point that you other people who are, let's say, talking about civil rights, you're talking to the people, you know, and so forth.

But we are the people. After the social and political upheaval of the 60s, the role of genes in society continued to evolve. And Bruce, as the menswear editor of Town and Country magazine for much of the 70s and 80s, he saw that happen firsthand. There was starting in the 70s, I'm going to say, apart from the people on campus, the flower power students and so forth, who were wearing very ornately distressed jeans and so forth, apart from that, there was a certain, I have to, take refuge in the French term, nostalgia de la Bou. A longing for that simple time, for a peasant look, the idea of going back to a simpler era. I remember, for example, I was walking up Madison Avenue one day. This was in the mid-70s, and coming towards me was a stunning woman, and she was wearing a

a denim ranch jacket, but when she got closer, it was open, and I could see that it was lined in mink. You know. The jeans I'm getting made, by the way, are not going to be lined in mink. I've asked Ben via piano to make them as classic as possible. Well, not 19th century classic, more like mid-20th century classic. And I'm dropping by his workshop just as he's sewing the buttonfly on my jeans. Okay, that was amazing. First of all, you had to like go in and out and back and forth and there were levers and spinny things all over the place. And then boom, you have a buttonhole. Yeah. How many of those do you think you've done? I've actually made to this to date, I think around 1771 jeans or something like that. Right. Microphone cannot capture my jaw hitting the floor. That's a lot of jeans. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot. But, but. But I mean, for a one-man show, sure.

That's quite a few, I guess. Now, I'm thinking because, you know, I'm making assumptions here, but because you're an artisan, can I assume that this is, like it doesn't have chemicals, doesn't have synthetics or anything like that? I actually do have materials that have some polyester in them. I do have materials that have acrylic and whatnot. But it's more or less, it's for the, it's for the look, you know. And I'm not making thousands and thousands of garments and polluting the,

you know, the river and you're near in Toronto, but, and most of my stuff is, is all just raw. So I'm not washing it. I'm not, you know, sometimes I might pre-soak it for the customer, but most of the chemicals that go into it are, I mean, yeah, genes are pretty gnarly for the environment, but. Well, I wonder if it's, you know, if you can equate it at all in terms of food, that when you have like mass produced beef, it's a huge drain on the environment in terms of the energy that goes into feeding them and caring for them, and then, of course, the ethical questions

of how they're treated and so on and so forth. In terms of denim, are you sort of closer to the organic farmer, the local farmer who, you're still killing animals, but you're raising them relatively well? That's, again, it's a very tricky question. A lot of people love the word sustainability these days, and unless someone sits behind a loom

in Toronto or all the major cities and makes denim for the local market, it's not really 100% sustainable. It's still a tricky one. And I don't like to beat around the bush and be like, I'm sustainable. I'm this. No, I'm like, I'm making blue jeans. Like there's, there's going to be some water involved. There's going to be some stuff involved. I mean, yeah, starches that come from animal byproducts, maybe starches that come from, to be honest, I don't know all these things. And I'm, I don't know if I'm supposed to know them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But would you say at least,

is the indigo real indigo? On some of them, yes. On some of them, it's a chemical compound. I mean, I know that I've played with indigo dying before, and when I got the first samples, it was this, you know, chemically made indigo powder. Then they would give you sodium hydrosulfite. Smells like, kind of like when you pass gas, almost, a little bit of eggs. And then caustic soda, which is bleach, you know, pretty gnarly stuff. And then premisole, which is basically windex. It's a wetting agent. It spreads things.

So this is, I mean, even when companies say that it's natural indigo, they're going to use the premisole sodium hydro sulfite and caustic soda. Maybe it's just the natural indigo powder. Maybe. Because you need something to bond the indigo to the cotton, right? Exactly. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's any better, you know? As Ben says, even his 1771 pairs pale in comparison to the worldwide consumption of genes. Some estimates put genes production at over one billion pairs a year, with the average American owning at least seven pairs.

But here's the thing. Think of those chemicals Ben was talking about at this gigantic scale. Some have even said that because of the toxins involved, combined with their sheer numbers, genes are the most polluting garment in the world. It turns out, though, it's a bit more complicated than that. My name is Alden Wicker. I'm a freelance journalist based in New York

who writes mainly about sustainable fashion. Most of the good data, the best data is actually coming out of the large fashion companies themselves, at least the ones that are interested in transparency and trying to do things better. So the data we have is scant. What we do know is that denim is predominantly made with genetically modified cotton, and a lot of it is grown in a certain fertile region of India. GMO cotton is an incredibly water-thirsty crop, so I visited some of these farms in Gujarat, India,

and they dig these canals through and then they pump the water out of the canals using old diesel-powered pumps. If there's not enough water coming through, these crops can fail and they're expensive to grow and if you don't get a high return on them, it can ruin the livelihood of a farmer.

And the pesticides are another thing. GMO crops almost always require pesticides and they can be applied in a really irresponsible way. So you're supposed to apply them using wearing a face mask and gloves and everything. But a lot of farmers don't do that. And so they're just ingesting these pesticides as they walk down the field, spraying them on these crops.

And because so many people want their genes to be stretchy, the cotton is then mixed with synthetic fibers when being woven into denim. So the synthetic fibers are made from oil. They're essentially just plastic threads. And so right away you're getting into these mixed fibers. which is important because at the end of the use of your genes, it has these synthetic fibers in them, so you can't compost them, you can't recycle them because of these synthetic fibers.

The next step, and this comes actually before the denim is woven, is that the individual threads need to be dyed that classic blue. If it's for a fast-fashioned brand, you're probably going to be using a sulfur-based dye, which is really bad for human health. It's really bad for the health of the environment and for the rivers that it's getting dumped into. These are the chemicals that Ben was talking about, which include sodium hydro sulfite, caustic soda, and premisole, all of which can cause pain, redness, even burns if in direct contact with skin or eyes. In a typical factory, the workers are supposed to be wearing masks and gloves and essentially wellies,

rain boots, because there's so much water being slashed around on the floor, and you have these fumes coming up from the dyeing process, oftentimes they don't want to. They'll be wearing flip-flops. They'll be wearing whatever makes them comfortable. So they're inhaling these fumes. It's coming in through their skin because they're touching these toxic dyes all the time. And then the dyes are being washed off of the floor and into drains,

and they are supposed to be processed. So I saw a couple of different wastewater treatment plants in Bangladesh and also in Vietnam. In Bangladesh, they actually have a fish pond, and one of the managers said that he'll go fishing and grab a fish out and bring it home for dinner with his mom. And if any of the fish die, they empty the pond. They would check the wastewater treatment system, and then they would fill it back up again and restock it with fish. So that's their little, that's their canary in the coal mine, I guess. But a lot of places don't do that. They just dump it straight into the nearest waterway that empties into the river.

and then in developing countries, you have children and people who are getting their water untreated from that river, so they're ingesting that water directly. Once the denim is dyed and woven, the jeans are constructed. And for those millions and millions of new genes created every year, just picture endless rows of people sitting in front of sewing machines because, after all, genes are still made pretty much the way Ben makes them, with lots of handwork.

But the labor isn't finished with, the sewing, something else people demand of their jeans is distressing, fades, lines, even rips. In the past few decades, the way genes are destroyed is by hand and through sandblasting. So by hand, what they'll do is they'll take the jeans and they put them on these two legs, and then they inflate these rubber balloons on the legs so that the denim is stretched out over these machine legs. and then they take a piece of sandpaper in each hand

and they just attack the jeans, whiskering downwards to get that faded look. They'll also take a drangle drill and they'll put holes into the jeans in pre-specified places where the brand wants these holes to be. And then sandblasting, which is terrible for the workers, they blast sand onto the jeans to get that worn look,

but the workers can develop silicosis in their lungs. Most brands have banned that from their supply chain. But I think it's still happening in some places, especially in factories that produce for brands that do not care about their reputation and only care about price. And that, I'm afraid to say, also comes down to us. As long as we seek out the cheapest pairs of jeans available, without questioning the price, companies will continue the race to the bottom. Now, to be fair, the picture isn't completely bleak. Some companies, like Levi's, are investing in technologies to use less water in cotton production, even lasers to create. the distressing on genes.

But from a customer's point of view, it can be almost impossible to tell the ethical genes from all the others. I do think consumers should care, though. And I think the best thing that consumers can do is to buy less and buy better and then tell brands

that they are worrying about this. Question for you personally, before you looked into all this stuff and before you learned about the hand sanding and the dry malls and all that sort of stuff, and you bought yourself distressed genes, did you ever wonder, how they got that way?

No, isn't that the crazy thing? I mean, until I started really looking into this, I didn't think about it. And I think that's the way most people think about fashion. It shows up and you buy it if you like it, and that's it. I think a lot of people think that machines are making their clothes, but denim and fashion is still a very handmade process. There are very few machines that can do even, one part of the assembly line of a pair of jeans.

So there are millions and millions, some even estimate billions, of pairs of jeans made and bought every year. You probably own a few yourself, but I will bet anything that you don't have as many as this guy, not even close. My name is Rodi Carrer, born in 1959 in a small alpine village in Switzerland, 19703, I started collecting jeans. I'm the founder of the Denim Museum. How many pairs of jeans do you currently have?

At the moment, we are approximately thinking about 8,000 pair of jeans and 6,000 denim jackets, approximately. Okay, 8,000 pairs of jeans, 6,000 jean jackets. Yeah, so about 14,000 items. Why so many? Like, you know, I was thinking to myself, if somebody owned 14 pairs of jeans, that'd be a lot of jeans. If somebody owned 1,400 pairs of jeans, it would be like, oh, my God, that's a lot of jeans.

But 14,000? Why? For me, genes is almost very attractive, and every denim evolution, every fading is a little bit different. It's very unique. In case you didn't catch that, because I have to admit, I didn't at first, Rudy mentioned denim evolution, which is the term he uses for the way genes age as you wear them. You know, the fade lines, the honeycombing, the rips and the tears. And I want to have as many samples as possible from many brands.

There are so many brands. And genes is one of the most common clothes in the world. And I want to just show people on several samples and many brands, the possibility and the power of denim evolution. Many people get genes when they're kids, but they don't go on to collect thousands of genes. Why did you love them so much right away? way? For me, jeans immediately became a sort of fetish and erotic part as well and a status

symbol for I wanted to be like James Dean or Elvis Presley, Beatles. So I wanted to be a rebel, but it was very difficult in this very small remote place. Now, you mentioned, I think you said that the jeans were erotic. Now, do you mean they made you feel sexy? Yeah, the denim fabric. I think it's for many people I know that this denim fabric can be

something sexy and for me it's also like a little bit of a fetish because I wanted to be a rebel but I didn't

I was too shy to be a rebel so I tried to at least to leave this out wearing jeans and denim jackets now you're

standing in the museum right now and we're talking on video because I'd like to you know I can't unfortunately can't zip over to Zurich right now, but I'd love to show me, can you show me,

and I'll try to describe, show me some of your highlights, some of the pieces that you have on display, why you have them on display? I can just stand up and show you some stuff, if you like. So picture this. Rudy is standing in the middle of a long attic room, so one wall is kind of slanted, and there's only one small window, and everywhere you look, there are piles and piles of folded jeans. They're on top of tables, they're on boxes, they're on the floor. Even the walls are covered with jeans and jean jackets hanging on display. But these aren't pristine jeans like at the mall.

They're worn, they're faded, full of holes. In fact, honestly, some of them look like Rudy fed them to dogs. And they're also never washed, so they're smelly, but they have strong... Wait, wait, wait, wait, never washed? Of course. Otherwise, the color tone will change. Otherwise, the color tone will change. But if you never wash them,

Yeah, the original rodentum color tone will always change when you wash jeans. So this is a washed jeans, royal blue. The color tone is a chemical reaction. After washing, the color tone will change from original rodentem color tone to the, you call it in English royal blue color tone. Ah, yeah, the unwashed pair has sort of a grayish, a grayish slate blue color. Exactly. If you try to forget about the dirtiness in it, then the original color tone,

you can probably imagine how it is. And the washed ones. Well, I would say you don't so much forget about the dirtiness. You smell the dirtiness. Yeah, of course. Rudy is on a mission with his jeans museum. He hopes that by showing people, especially young people, the beauty of denim evolution, they will give up fast fashion.

That instead of purchasing authenticity, they'll make it themselves. They don't have the patience. They want to walk in a store, buy a jeans, and walk out like a cowboy. So would your advice be to somebody to say, get yourself raw denim jeans, wear them every day, and then in about two to three weeks they will start to soften, and then maybe some people may be convinced to say, okay, okay, I'll buy the raw denim, but I think it's going to be hard to convince people not to wash their pants. That's a very big issue.

I don't want to be a missionary. I just tell always people, use your jeans in your best way, because they are your jeans, so don't feel pressed. You don't have to, not allowed to wash them or whatever. So there is also an option to extend the life a little bit, just do a little soak at the beginning to get rid of the starch. So the denim fabric is not breaking that fast at the crotch or the...

And also wearing oversized is also helpful because then it's not breaking so fast, especially the crotch area. Do you still feel like a rebel for wearing jeans? A little bit. but I'm always feeling a little bit like a rebel. Even though everybody wears jeans? Yeah, of course, I know it's not the hippie time

where you were shocking your parents with long hair, rock music and jeans. But I still, because I'm wearing them the hardcore never washed way, so I mean I'm still a little bit freaky. If you want to add to Rudy's massive pile of jeans with your own examples of the so-called natural denim evolution, check out jeansmuseum.org. We link to it through our website at cbc.ca.ca.com slash ideas. Now, there's that one theme that keeps coming up.

The idea that genes are a, well, complicated symbol and signifier of authenticity. It's a complicated symbol that fascinates denim historian Emma McClendon. When you see denim today marketed as a kind of authentic heritage item, What's interesting is that so much of the story or the legacy that's attached to them is a romantic, you know, nostalgic view of it where it is put into a kind of mythology and not really the gritty reality of work, of labor, that the work of workware has been taken out of it, that it's about the idea of them as workware and not about control. confronting the reality of who actually wore these garments and what they wore them for and what their experience would have been like in these garments and what these garments meant to them. Jeans are so ubiquitous now that you can find them in any country and you can find them in the wardrobe of any person, no matter their gender identity, their race, their age,

their size, you know, genes don't have a fixed meaning, really, anymore. At the same time, when you talk to people about their genes, it inevitably gets very personal about that specific pair that they love and the way that it wears and the way that it's frayed or ripped or gotten a mark. or there's always a story around it. And there's also a certain obsession, I think, about the way genes can become personalized over time through the marks on the fabric itself

that is just so interesting to me because it stands in stark contrast to this idea of the genes as this connecting force across the world. A connecting force and also one that shapes our visual, political, and environmental landscape. The same holds true for virtually every item of clothing. Clothing is one of the biggest industries, employers, infrastructures in the world. It's also one of the biggest polluters in the world.

It was one of the original industries of the Industrial Revolution. Looms and the technology of looms established the, infrastructure for how we were going to think about computers. And so there's so many aspects to this as an industry, as a social practice, as an environmental endeavor that make it, in my opinion, one of the most important things for us to talk about and consider because every single person on the planet engages with it every day of their lives from getting dressed to go. going to bed from consuming something to throwing it away. And if you don't understand it, you're very much risking, to put it bluntly, being duped by the system and not fully engaging with all the possibilities of how you could interact and engage with this vital part of our global existence.

So, Emma, do you have a favorite pair of jeans? My dirty little secret is that I actually have never found my perfect pair of jeans. I, despite having studied jeans and denim for years and written a book on its history and an exhibition, all about jeans and how they're worn, I do not actually like wearing jeans. I personally find jeans to be a very difficult thing to shop for and a very difficult thing to wear as a woman. I think that the reality of jeans is that as pants, there is a difficulty in fitting them to women's bodies on a mass scale. And I think that on a very personal level, the fit of jeans is incredibly important. And so for me, it's maybe an answer that is a bit surprising from someone who's spent so much time studying jeans.

But I do not wear jeans very often at all. Me neither. I haven't worn jeans in over a decade because I felt that there were just too many of them in the world. And I didn't want to add to that pile. But I have a new perspective on denim, and I've taken that mantra to buy less, but buy better, to heart. My custom jeans are more expensive than off the rack, but they're made locally of raw denim, and they should last for years and years. And over those years, they will develop a patina because of the way I wear them. Hey again, Ben, how's it going?

How's it going? Jeans are ready. Yeah, I got the text. Okay, here they are. Well, that's a beautiful-looking denim. Okay, so let's open them up here. It's a dark blue, classic. You're listening to The Problem with Genes by Ideas contributor Pedro Mendez.

Okay, well, I guess it's the moment of truth. I'm going to go put them on. Do you have a change room or a spot that I can? No, you've got to use the washroom like a boss. Okay, all right. I'm going to go into the washroom. I'm going to try them on. I'll be right out.

A big thank you to all the guests in our program. You can learn more about their work through our website, CBC.ca.c.c. Ideas. Put my leg in, one leg. Oh, my. So stiff. Barely get my legs in and now pull them up over my waist. Thanks to Eva Frischach and our CBC studio in New York City. And to audio technician, Katarina Hackstedt. And now I have to do, it's a button fly, of course.

Each button is a lot of... work to do up. Okay. All right, Ben, these are really, really stiff. Like, I have to, like, I feel like I can't even bend my knees. You got to tough it out for the first little bit, then they're going to form to you, and then they'll be yours forever. You've got to find your spot, and you wear how you like it. All right, great advice. Thank you. No problem. Anytime. Senior producer, Nikola Luchschich. Danielle Duval is our technical. producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.