A simple pair of pants may contain a multitude of meanings. In the 1850s, jeans were the unemotional, durable dress of those that came to California to labor in the gold fields. 
Seams were strengthened with metal pins to make them hold, a technology borrowed from the construction of horse blankets. 
Cloth for beasts of burden was translated to the needs of men of burden. These were the clothes of hard-laboring people, and these pants held little promise for the men who wore them, save the promise that they would be ready for the next day's labors.
"the gown worn by a fashionable lady in attendance contained 1,100 yards of material not including lace and other ornaments." American women of wealth were also wrapped in an abundance of cloth. While makers of jeans worried over how many men could be fitted into a given amount of cloth, for women of wealth the concern was with how many yards of cloth could be attractively arranged upon a given individual. This was the mark of prosperity: to wear enough material on one's back to clothe many of more modest means. The fashionable rich could not imagine themselves wearing the vulgar canvas pants of workers and "peasants". Neither could working-class people reasonably imagine themselves in the costumes of wealth and power. The only fashion link between them — subtle at best — was the stern top hat of wealthy capitalists, a coal-black cylinder symbolizing the factory chimney pipes that brought profit to one, hardship to the other. Blue jeans only signified labor and sweat. Years later, the clothing of nineteenth-century laborers would assume new and different meanings. Humble beginnings became increasingly obscure within the unfolding of popular culture. In the movies, the horse riders of the early cattle industry were reborn as symbols of a noble, rural simplicity, and blue jeans became conspicuous within the landscape of the American media. On the screen these pants teased the imaginations of city folk, who longed for a simpler and less corrupt life. While laborers would continue to wear them at work, now the well-off might put on a pair at home or in the garden — an escape from the discipline of the business world.
In the 1950s, blue jeans became a statement by those who wished to boycott the values of a consumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of Cold-War America; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture — blue jeans — became a rejection of traditional culture. These images found an eager audience among those for whom gray suits and formal dresses had been elevated as ideals of the age. In blue jeans, men and boys found relief from the priorities of the business world; women and girls found relief from the underlying harness required to fit into more formal wear. Even some among the middle class slipped into jeans for a sleepy afternoon on the porch. By the mid-sixties, blue jeans were an essential part of the wardrobe of those with a commitment to social struggle. In the American Deep South, black farmers and grandchildren of slaves still segregated from whites, continued to wear jeans in their mid-nineteenth-century sense; but now they were joined by college students — black and white — in a battle to overturn deeply embedded race hatred. The clothes of the workers became a sacred bond between them. The clothing of toil came to signify the dignity of struggle.
In the student rebellion and the antiwar movement that followed, blue jeans and work shirts provided a contrast to the uniforms of the dominant culture. Jeans were the opposite of high fashion, the opposite of the suit or military uniform. With the rise of the women's movement in the late 1960s, the political significance of dress became increasingly explicit. Rejecting orthodox sex roles, blue jeans were a woman's weapon against uncomfortable popular fashions and the view that women should be passive. This was the cloth of action; the cloth of labor became the badge of freedom.
On television, in magazine advertising, on the sides of buildings and buses, jeans call out to us. Their humble past is obscured; practical roots are incorporated into a new aesthetic. Jeans are now the universal symbol of the individual. They are the costume of liberated women, with a fit tight enough to restrict like the harness of old — but with the look of freedom and motion.
Yet looking at fashions, in and of themselves, reveals situations that often defy understanding. Our ability to understand a specific fashion — the current one of jeans, for example — shows us that as we try to make sense of it, our confusion intensifies. It is a fashion whose very essence is contradiction and confusion. To pursue the goal of understanding is to move beyond the actual cloth itself, toward the more general phenomenon of fashion and the world in which it has risen to importance. What events, what developments, what forces proceeded to make fashion a more important concern than function among increasing numbers of people? In what ways have fashion and society coincided, particularly in the context of changes in the structure, habits, and economy of the society?
Exploring the role of fashion within the social and political history of industrial America helps to reveal the parameters and possibilities of American society. The ultimate question is whether the development of images of rebellion into mass-produced fashions has actually resulted in social change. (Words: 1,006)