My first
pair of jeans I owned in the U.S. bore the Wrangler label and were relatively
cheap, twenty dollars. On the black market, people living under impoverished communism
had to pay $150 for the same pair if they wanted to own it, or exchange it for
other goods and services. The proletariat were all poor working people, making
around 800 lei per month, which translated into $67, at the pegged exchange
rate imposed by the Communist Party of 12 lei to a dollar.
The decision
was not hard to make, it was more important to survive and use a pair of jeans worth
$150 as commodity money than to actually wear it. Besides, western wear was
considered decadent and frowned upon.
If one owned
a pair of jeans, that person was either a member of the Communist Party and
thus able to buy goods cheaper or in foreign currency, deriving extra income from
bribes from one’s position in government; from the confiscation of goods from
black marketers arrested; as a security police informer who received extra
income from snitching on neighbors and relatives; or as a black marketer who
bought and sold foreign goods, donated or purchased from traveling foreigners.
Since blue
jeans were bought and sold on the black market and often traded for other
foreign goods and/or domestic services such as medical care and
pharmaceuticals, one could argue that blue jeans were a strong commodity money
in communist regimes. They were almost as valuable as a cassette player.
Using jeans
as commodity money was not something new, people traded goods and services in
many countries. In times of war and economic depression, people used
cigarettes, chocolate, nylons, soap, tobacco, pelts, shampoo, bullets,
medicine, and other goods in shorts supply as commodity money.
At the time
the Wrangler jeans cost $20, the minimum wage in the U.S. was $3.10 per hour.
That was hardly enough to pay bills and still have money left to cover other
costs, including clothes. The blue jeans would have cost a day’s work.
My friends
at the time, Joan and Gail, had gifted me on my birthday my first pair of real
American blue jeans, Wrangler, made in the good ole U.S.A., not in China. They
were simple, durable, simple, and affordable.
But they were so much more. They represented the quintessential American
spirit of freedom, of exploration and adventure, as well as the work ethic and
resilience in the American west tamed by good ole cowboys and other immigrants
who came to America to settle in the land with so many possibilities. The jeans
became the workhorse of the west in the new America because they could last so
long.
Levi’s were
the original miner’s brown pants reinforced with rivets. A miner’s wife in
Reno, Nevada, asked tailor Jacob Davis in 1871 to make pants that would
withstand the tears of pockets and button fly and he came up with the rivets. Local
miners wore overalls made of a canvas material called “duck cloth,” in light
brown. Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss, a German immigrant who owned a dry-goods
store in San Francisco, applied for and received a patent for pants reinforced
with rivets.
I am sure, a
pair of Levi jeans would have been more expensive back in the day when my first
pair of Wrangler jeans was purchased. Sometimes I wish that I still had that
first pair of jeans. I lost it in the many moves and clothes donations I have
made since then.
The original
Blue Bell brand was sewn and manufactured for men but, when the company became
Wrangler in 1960, women were eventually included in the manufacturing process. To
this day, cowboys and farmers prefer the Wrangler brand.
The truth is
that foreigners, when they think of America, they think of blue jeans and
cowboys with big felt hats riding into the sunset on their horses or driving
their Mustangs onto the wide open roads. It is not that they want to be
cowboys, they envy the free spirit and the ability to go anywhere at the drop
of a hat, to ride into endless possibilities and dreams.
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