jeans

The article of clothing jeans is first named in 1795, referring to blue military uniforms supplied by Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. They were called “bleu des Gênes”, where Gênes is the French word for Genoa. More specifically, for centuries Gênes had been a shortened metonym for the material “jean fustian” in both English and French, fustian being a specific kind of heavy cloth that became a Genoese specialty in the 1500s.

Jeans first show up in their modern form when German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss filed a US patent for reinforcing clothing with copper rivets in 1873. Their original material was neither blue nor denim, but by 1908 “jeans” were widely known to refer to the specific kind of riveted blue denim work clothes Levi’s manufactured. For 70 years they were just known as work clothes used in specific jobs, starting with mining and expanding to other industries, like how we think of steel-toed boots today. Reflecting this image, they were often called “waist overalls” through the 1940s.

This all changed when James Dean wore jeans in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, turning them into a symbol of youth counterculture. Over the next few decades, they became a symbol of the equal rights movement, then a mundane, everyday clothing item, with bell-bottomed, stone-washed, distressed, JNCO, lowrider, skinny, and ripped jeans coming into and out of fashion.

The portmanteau jorts is first attested in 1995 but was not recognized by the OED until 2013. (However, “Daisy Dukes”, specifically referring to very short jorts, dates back to the 1980s.) Jeggings is a newer coinage, dating to 2009.