Denim jeans originated in Italy, not France, art historian claims

Clues to the origins of denim jeans have been discovered in the works of a forgotten 17th century painter, suggesting the fashion favourite came from Italy nearly 400 years ago rather than France.

BY Nick Squires in Rome | 21 September 2010

Three paintings have come to light in which the unknown artist, believed to be from northern Italy , depicts scenes in the 1650s in which ordinary people are wearing what appears to be an early denim fabric - centuries before it was worn by the cowboys of the American Wild West or Hollywood stars of the 1950s.

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In one picture, a peasant woman, wearing a skirt that appears to be made of denim, mends a piece of clothing.

In another, a teenage girl wearing a torn blue skirt made out of rough fabric, begs for money.

The third depicts a young boy wearing a torn jacket made from a dark blue cloth. The rips in the jacket, and in the peasant woman's skirt, reveal that the fabric is indigo but threaded with white - just like modern jeans.

The unknown artist, whose paintings went on show at the Galerie Canesso in Paris this week, has been dubbed the "Master of the Blue Jeans".

Jeans are believed to have originated either in Nimes in France - "de Nimes" gives us the word denim - or in Genoa, in north-western Italy, with the city's name in French - Gênes - eventually morphing into the English "jeans".

Until now, there were only fragmented written records to rely on to document the shipments of the low-cost fabric that flooded from Genoa into northern Europe -- and especially England -- in the mid-17th century.

But art historians believe the newly-discovered works were painted somewhere around Venice, suggesting that jeans have Italian, rather than French, ancestry.

"In people's minds, jeans used to be all about Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, about the United States," said Francois Girbaud, a designer who helped curate the exhibition.

"Nimes or Genoa? I don't have the answer. But it's amusing to think that jeans already existed in 1655."

Establishing exactly where jeans originated has been difficult because few records documenting their earliest manufacture and export survived.

Unlike finely embroidered clothing owned by the aristocracy, which has ended up in collections and museums, denim was favoured by the working class, who wore it until it fell to pieces and had to be discarded.

"We have accounts from an English tailor saying that his fabric came from Genoa, and that is the origin of jeans," said the curator of the exhibition, Gerlinde Gruber.

"But this gives us new documentary proof of a historical reality that has been forgotten."

A total of 10 paintings have been attributed to the unknown Italian artist and were gathered together after being discovered in collections in Italy and the United States.