Blue Jeans as Commodity Money

One day my body stopped having so much metabolism and the pairs of blue jeans I owned, mostly indigo blue made of stretchy cotton for extra luxury, stopped fitting me comfortably. It was high time to donate them to someone who could wear them and enjoy them. Long gone were the days of the 26-inch waist.

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.