Blue Magic

My mother's family name is Denham, which is Scottish — Grandpa Denham came over from Glasgow in 1915 with six little Denhams — and when I was little and first heard the word "denim," I assumed that we had invented it. Of course, if I had looked up "denim" in the dictionary, I'd have seen that the name comes from Nimes, a city in southern France (de Nimes), and yet homonyms are powerful to a child, and when you mentioned denim to me, I imagined the vast Denham Trouser Works on the outskirts of Glasgow, the loyal workers at their looms, the tragic fire that wiped out the family fortune and forced Grandpa to sell the patent for a pittance, the weeping workers waving their hankies at the quay as he sailed for America, etc.

Denim trousers were the cornerstone of every boy's wardrobe then, and we bought ours cheap from Montgomery Wards, stiff dark-blue coveralls — there were no pre-faded jeans, you faded them yourself by running around and roughhousing in them. Jeans were the only clothes that you could go play in the dirt in without your mother getting mad at you.

In our fundamentalist family, we attended church every Sunday morning and went back in the evening for a gospel service and sometimes in the afternoon for Bible reading, which all demanded a white shirt and dress slacks, of course, but after dinner we boys were allowed to change into blue jeans for a few hours and play football in the yard.

Thus denim came to symbolize freedom to me. My first suit was a dark brown wool pinstripe bought on the occasion of my Aunt Ruby's funeral, and I wore it to church every Sunday. It felt solemn and mournful to me. You couldn't run in a suit, you could only lumber like an old man. When church was over, and you put on denim trousers, you walked out the door into the wide green world and your cousin threw you the ball and suddenly your body was restored, you could make moves.

I went to high school in the Fifties, when blue denim had gained unsavory cultural associations — it was biker and beatnik clothing, outlaw garb, a cousin to the ducktail, a symbol of Elvis, and as such, it was banned at our school. Every September, we were read the dress code by our homeroom teacher: you could wear brown denim, or grey, or green, but not blue. Why? "Because," she explained. There have to be rules, and blue denim was a statement of rebellion, and we were in school to learn and not to flaunt our individuality. So there.

I liked school. I loved going into the library, to the shelf of brand-new books, and opening them and smelling them. I loved writing stories and poems in English. I was willing to forego blue denim in order to stay in school. But when I went away to the University of Minnesota, of course I wore blue jeans every day.

I was a writer, an intellectual, a radical (I thought), and blue jeans were part of the uniform, a way of showing that you weren't a Young Republican or a chemical-engineering major.

I wore a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches, a blue Oxford buttondown shirt, brown leather work boots, and faded blue jeans. I wore that uniform for years, until my son became a teenager, and then I felt obliged to move aside and leave blue denim to him. I bought a grey plaid double-breasted suit, and then a grey pinstripe suit, and a brown wool one and a blue seersucker, and a tuxedo, which I love. When I wear it, my son looks at me in awe — the only tuxedo guys he knows are wealthy playboys in old movies — and I remind him that the tuxedo is just another kind of uniform, and some blue jeans these days cost more than a tuxedo.

Faded blue denim is the mythical fabric of America, and in Europe young people are crazy about it as just that emblem, representing the Wild West, Greenwich Village, Marlon Brando, Woody Guthrie, and Grant Wood all rolled into one. You can be a computer programmer in Copenhagen, but when you pull on blue jeans, you hear a horse whinny and feel a guitar on your back: the Danish word for jeans is cowboy-bukser, cowboy pants. A man in a suit is a man in a suit, but someone in blue jeans is part of an American myth, and that is a great gift to the world.

The role of the Denham family in creating this magic fabric is not generally known, but I am proud of us nevertheless. A humble family of Scottish immigrants and yet we handed America its pants.