No Small Price to Pay for Denim Perfection
By GUY TREBAY
In the beginning there was Levi's. And Levi's begat Wrangler and Lee. And Wrangler and Lee begat Jordache and Calvin Klein and Sergio Valente. And then, moved by the mystical and inexorable forces of the American marketplace, the jeans makers all went forth and multiplied. By now every parent of a teenager is aware of this reality. The days when the crucial decision in purchasing a pair of blue jeans was as simple as predicting the degree of inseam shrinkage are as remote as the Gold Rush.
To shop for blue jeans nowadays is to be confronted with a welter of styles, cuts, fits, washes, hip-heights, denims, studs, grommets and pocket details. Although a majority of jeans sold to Americans cost less than $20, it is the high end of the market, where prices are the stuff of sticker shock, that seems to have consumers entranced.
"It's not just in New York, it's everywhere now," said Claire Dupuis, a trend forecaster for Cotton Incorporated, a trade group. "I was recently in a store called Copper Penny in Charleston, S.C., and they were blowing out the jeans from Seven, Habitual and Notify."
In industry parlance those brands are called premium denims, priced from $75 to more than $250. Even as Levi's attempts to dig itself out from a seven-year slump in sales, the new brands have raced to claim the real estate vacated by the iconic jeans makers' loss of hegemony.
Among the better known labels there are Rogan, Seven for All Mankind, Miss Sixty and Diesel, one of whose founders, Adriano Goldschmied, is widely credited with having originated the notion of "premium" jeans. And there are also the scores of brands that one might call the children of Goldschmied: Earl, Chip and Pepper, Paper Denim & Cloth, G-Star, Citizens of Humanity, Habitual, Notify and Blue Guru.
In a sense, premium denims are to Levi's as microbrews are to mass market beers like Budweiser. Although they account for no more than 3 percent of the $11 billion overall jeans market, it is worth noting that the category itself barely existed just a few years back. Besides, "3 percent of $11 billion is fairly substantial," Ms. Dupuis said.
The premium denim trend has evolved as high fashion and the workplace continue their flirtation with the notion that blue jeans are the one item of apparel suitable in almost any situation. At last year's Paris runway show of Karl Lagerfeld's Lagerfeld Gallery collection, for instance, the models wore tailored frock coats over Diesel jeans.
"I have friends who make fun of me for paying $150 for jeans," said Scott Willig, a senior at Princeton who was surveying the confounding selection at Barneys Co-op in Manhattan last week. "But if you wear them all the time and only have a few pairs, it's really worth it."
A large part of the allure of premium denims seems to be their cult appeal. It is the rare pair of premium jeans that comes without an instruction manual ("Atencion," reads the hang tag on one pair of $240 Rogan jeans. "This denim is designed to age quicker, so take care in wear and do not hesitate to repair. Easy on the washing — hand wash — and hand dry — in the sun") or an elaborate written narrative that makes a trip to Barneys feel like a interview at an adoption agency.
"Consumers can identify in one second the difference between Japanese and Chinese denim," said Deirdre Maloney, an owner of Brand Pimps and Media Whores, a fashion consulting company in New York. "They know the back story on construction and fabrics, the grommets, the washes, the finishing."
They know, said Tom Ovejas, a salesman at Barneys Co-op on Madison Avenue, that Diesel jeans have a generous rise; that Paper Denim & Cloth has distinctive yellow stitching, a grommet on the fly and washes numbered to indicate imaginary years of wear. They know that Chip and Pepper jeans are based on 1950's styles; that the most desirable of all the Levi's special edition vintage jeans are the ones that have a capital E on the tiny red rear pocket label. They know that Rogans are what everyone wears on "Friends."
"Premium denim is probably the most important element" of the merchandising equation for the new Bloomingdale's SoHo that opened last Saturday, said the store's fashion director, Kal Ruttenstein. In the denim department of Bloomingdale's six-level store on lower Broadway, there are 18 lines of blue jeans for women and 12 for men.
"At the moment there doesn't seem to be a limit to the appetite or even a price ceiling," Mr. Ruttenstein said. "People are in the gym more these days and they want jeans that show that off."
More precisely, consumers seem constantly in quest of jeans that package their assets to greatest advantage. "It's all about a girl and her rear view," said Kim France, the editor of the Condé Nast shopping magazine Lucky. "How many different ways can you make the rear view look good?"
Habitual readers of polls in men's magazines are aware that this is not exclusively a feminine concern. "Girls, women or significant others want to scope the crotch and the legs," claimed Jade Howe, the president and creative director of Howe denims, a company whose advertising exhorts men to stop stealing their girlfriend's jeans.
In September 2001, Mr. Howe was among the earliest to take men's jeans and radically lower the rise, to use industry terminology for the distance from waistband to crotch. As it turned out, what worked for rock stars like Justin Hawkins, the peacock who fronts the Darkness, proved harder for the average guy to emulate. The premium denim market flattened slightly last year, according to the NPD Group, a market research company, which it attributed in part to male resistance to low-rise jeans.
"Manufacturers got a little burned on low-rise hip-huggers," said Minya Quirk, an owner of Brand Pimps and Media Whores.
All the same, Ms. Quirk added, the shift away from baggy urban jeans indicated to the marketplace that men were primed to follow women's lead in "deepening" their wardrobes and that they were ready to follow fashion from one hot and form-improving brand of jeans to the next.
Terence Bogan, a vice president and merchandising manager at Barneys Co-op, said he used to think the premium denim explosion had peaked. "You kind of wonder if there's a ceiling, but it doesn't seem to have hit one yet," he said.
Customers who are true fanatics may have added themselves to the waiting list for a pair of $280 jeans from Saddlelite, a cult brand that makes its denims from cotton that is woven on antique Japanese looms and sewn in limited lots in Glendale, Calif.
"Right now we're only selling to the very best stores," said Daniel Green, 20, who formed Saddlelite with a partner, Lukus Eichmann, also 20, just a year ago and has already gotten orders from Colette in Paris, Fred Segal in Los Angeles and Barneys New York. "As a consumer myself," Mr. Green said, "I've always been fond of the things that seemed more limited, that are not available for everyone."
Who, at this point, is not? "The presumption we've all operated under was that if some choice is good, more is better," said Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" (Ecco, 2004), a book whose germinus was a trip Mr. Schwartz made to Gap. "I was trying to buy a pair of jeans, and there were 100 different varieties," Mr. Schwartz said. "All of a sudden, I found that I cared, damn it, to get the ones that fit the best, and that my standards were raised despite my former complete indifference to that."
An "emotional purchase" is how Robert Burke, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, characterizes blue jeans, and there are few who would argue the point. "They have the most sex appeal of any garment you'll buy," Mr. Burke said. "What has happened now is that fact has crossed all age barriers and categories, so that customers across the board start wanting whatever is the latest thing." Two years ago, Mr. Burke said, that would have meant a pair of low-slung jeans from Seven. Now some retailers have stopped reordering Seven jeans, calling them overexposed.
"I was up at the Co-op a month ago and there was a new shipment of James jeans and these women were acting like it was something vital to human life," said Dawn Brown, vice president for publicity at Barneys. "I'm the kind of person who wore a pair of jeans to death and then got a new pair. You can't think like that anymore."
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