The expensive ingredient is 501

When I was young, a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers blue jeans seemed like essential kit. They were tough enough for outdoor work, respectable enough for most indoor activities and could be worn for several days without needing to be washed. More importantly, they were cool, and thus an unusually satisfactory combination of economy, laziness and fashion. At least, that is how I remember them.

More than half a century later, I recently looked at the price of Levi’s on Amazon. I was not planning to buy any, but I was planning to write about them. At my age I am entitled to investigate things without buying.

On Amazon’s British site, a pair of the famous Levi’s 501 jeans was selling for about £85. The less celebrated 505 could be found for around £40, although Amazon initially appeared to want another £14.70 to deliver them. This may have been because it was calculating delivery to an American address rather than to someone in Britain. Amazon is very clever, but it occasionally requires the customer to determine which country he is pretending to inhabit.

The 505 is not an economy version sewn from inferior cotton by trainee seamstresses in Bangladesh. It is a perfectly normal pair of Levi’s jeans. The most conspicuous difference is that the 501 has a button fly and the 505 has a zipper. There are modest differences in fit, but nothing that explains a price gap of £45.

In the United States, there is usually much less difference between the prices of the two models. Both are commonly offered for roughly $40 to $60, depending on size, colour and whatever mood the pricing algorithm is in on the day in question. In Britain, the numerical price can look much the same, except that the dollar sign has been replaced by a pound sign. This old international retailing trick becomes particularly noticeable when a pound buys considerably more than a dollar.

Britain does, of course, impose 20 percent VAT, while American prices normally have a state sales tax added at the checkout. VAT explains part of the difference. It does not explain how $50 becomes £85, any more than the English Channel explains why coffee costs more after crossing it, but it seems to me that the expensive ingredient is no longer cotton. It is the number 501.

Jeans began as working clothes. Their rivets, heavy cloth and reinforced pockets were intended for people who expected their pants to encounter dirt, tools and abrasive surfaces.

Cowboys were among the early adopters of blue jeans, sometimes adding leather chaps for health and safety reasons to protect their legs from thorn bushes and saddle sores. Hollywood later transformed this practical arrangement into a uniform readily available in movie set wardrobes and transferred some of the romance of the American West to anyone who could find the correct waist and inside-leg measurement.

To be perfectly frank, few British teenagers expected to rope cattle on the way home from school. Nevertheless, jeans offered membership in an imaginary America of ranches, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, rock and roll and rebellion. They were practical clothing with an imported mythology stitched into the waistband.

By the late 1960s, even the cowboy shape was insufficiently adventurous. Straight jeans could be opened along the lower seams and triangular inserts sewn into them to create hippie bell-bottoms. The inserts might be made of denim, velvet, flowered material or anything else calculated to alarm one’s parents.

This was customization before the word became a marketing department. You took an existing garment, found someone who could do some basic sewing and created something that did not exist in the shop. Today a designer performs a similar operation, calls it heritage reconstruction and adds $150 to the price.

Bell-bottoms themselves had travelled an interesting route. Sailors wore wide-legged trousers long before hippies adopted them. The shape made the legs easy to roll up when washing decks or wading ashore. Loose trousers could also be removed over footwear, and sailors were later taught to tie the legs and inflate wet trousers as an improvised flotation device. Historians are less certain that any of these advantages was the original reason for the design, but practicality helped preserve it. Naval surplus clothing then carried the style worn by Popeye into the counterculture.

So it was that the hippie bell-bottom combined the traditions of miners, cowboys and sailors, although it was not particularly well suited to mining, riding a horse or remaining upright on a wet deck.

Nor, in my experience, were jeans especially comfortable. They were scratchy, itchy and stiff. They could be sweaty in hot weather and surprisingly cold in cold weather. If they became wet, they soaked up water and then stayed wet long enough to become part of the day’s program.

This did not prevent American workplaces from discovering Casual Friday. For four days employees wore their normal work clothes. On Friday they were permitted, and sometimes almost expected, to replace them with jeans. Everyone then agreed that the jeans were more comfortable, even when they were plainly not. Casualness had acquired a uniform, and failure to purchase the Friday uniform could make a person seem insufficiently relaxed.

There was something faintly absurd about arriving at the office in heavy denim to demonstrate that the weekend was approaching. It was rather like being required to wear bedroom slippers at a board meeting to prove that management had become approachable. A person who came to work in normal work clothes on a Friday had misunderstood the ceremony and could be fingered as a nonconformist.

Politicians understood the symbolism particularly well. During the week they wore suits, but at weekends, or whenever photographers approached a ranch, they appeared in wide-brimmed hats, checked shirts,  jeans and boots with raised heels, as if Congress adjourned on Friday so its members could spend two days lassoing cattle and fighting rattlesnakes. The jeans communicated rugged authenticity without requiring anyone to perform useful outdoor work. They were pointless, but somehow expected.

The great virtue of jeans for ordinary students was not that they treated the wearer kindly, more that the wearer found them impossible to kill off.

This durability also permitted a relaxed attitude to laundering. A shirt showed every stain from spilled tea, soup, or perspiration, but jeans absorbed the evidence into their general character. Indeed, the longer they were worn, the more authentic they were said to become. This was fortunate because freshly washed denim could emerge from the machine feeling like roofing shingles.

There was one form of denim I found genuinely practical. Cut-off jeans were suitable for working on archaeological sites in summer. They tolerated dirt, stones and prolonged contact with the ground, while the pockets or belt loops could hold a digging trowel. Removing the lower legs improved ventilation and eliminated a considerable amount of unnecessary cloth.

Purpose-made jeans shorts were better still because they generally had wider, more comfortable legs. Homemade cut-offs retained the close-fitting architecture of the original trousers and merely ended sooner.

Phil Harding later demonstrated the correct use of denim shorts on the British television program Time Team. With his battered hat, shorts and trowel, he looked as though he had been digging continuously since the Neolithic period. This was denim performing honest work rather than promenading through a shopping mall.

The economics have now reversed. We once bought jeans because they were difficult to wear out. When they finally developed holes, we patched them. Manufacturers now abrade, bleach, tear and otherwise injure new jeans before selling them, sometimes at a premium. The customer pays extra for damage that previous generations obtained through years of useful activity.

Meanwhile, Temu will sell blue jeans in numerous colours and styles for less than $20, with particularly elaborate specimens approaching $30. They may not have the consistency or longevity of Levi’s, but the comparison reveals how little of an £85 price can represent the raw cloth and the labour required to sew it together.

What Levi’s sells is continuity with the past. The customer is purchasing a small share of miners, cowboys, Marlon Brando, rebellious teenagers and several generations of advertising. The 501 is no longer merely a pair of trousers. It is a registered item of Americana with belt loops.

There is nothing wrong with paying for that experience if one enjoys it. People buy watches that tell the same time as cheaper watches and cars that reach the same traffic light as cheaper cars. A brand is partly a story, and stories have value.

But I no longer want jeans. Modern lightweight pants or polyester corduroys are softer, cooler, quicker to dry and generally more accommodating to the person inside them. Jeans were appropriate when I wanted legwear capable of surviving an archaeological trench, kick starting a motorcycle, or several days without laundering. I now ask rather less of my pants and in return I prefer them to ask rather less of me.

The cowboy can keep his 501s. If I ever return to work on an archaeological site, I might need a pair of  the shorts.