Beyond the Blues Horizon

By JAY COCKS

Sales slip, Levi's hunkers down, and jeans fade out

It was a sea change, or, at the very least, like watching the water lighten close to shore. "An ocean of blue": that was the standard bird's-eye description of a rock concert, with the audience all fitted out in denim. Now, from a similar perspective, the whole palette has changed, run off into so many hues that rock-crowd colors look like what's left in the bottom of the dish after the banana split has melted.

Jeans became a cultural uniform in the '60s. By 1980 lots of big-shot fashion designers were slapping a logo, and a jacked-up price tag, onto a pair of denims. When John Travolta appeared in Urban Cowboy wearing city-slicker rodeo regalia, sales surged: an estimated 600 million pairs of jeans were sold in 1981 in the U.S. alone. The decline began the following year. Burlington Industries, fabric supplier to Levi's and others, estimates that 470 million pairs of jeans will be sold in the U.S. this year for a total of $7 billion. That is more than a billion dollars below the 1981 peak. "The market is just slightly off," says Richard Redden, president of Lee, where basic jeans made up 90% of the company's line last summer; now they are down to 70%. "We are going through some tough times right now," admits Levi's Chairman Peter Haas. Shrugs William Hervey, president of the Wrangler Menswear division of Blue Bell, Inc.: "I guess Travolta finally got off the bull."

Movie stars and mechanical barroom marvels may have marked the commercial rise and fall of jeans in the past few years, but there has been a long-term correlation between young music and youthful fashion. As pop music has slipped off into synthesizer chic and the full-dress soul of Michael Jackson and Prince, musicians have gone to increasingly elaborate lengths to dress the part, or, in the case of Culture Club's Boy George and other deliberately androgynous rockers, to cross-dress it. Audiences at a rock concert turn themselves out as a reflection of what the musicians are wearing, and these days that can be anything from prom dresses to bondage halters, items that denim does not become.

Youth may not be the strongest single market for jeans, but it is the pacesetting one. "The demographics have been somewhat against us," says Haas. "The baby boom moved into an older cohort. They have turned from jeans to other types of clothing," adds Levi's Senior Executive Martin Krasney. Levi's, which still holds 20% of the U.S. jeans market, has since last December closed 17 plants and sent dismissal notices to 10% of its work force. With earnings down 78% in the first six months of this fiscal year, Levi's plans to lay off 350 employees by the end of September. Wrangler's Hervey says that the great national jeans splurge following in the dust of Urban Cowboy was "an aberration. The whole country went Western-wear crazy. I don't see a lack of interest in jeans now, just less interest than there was for a while." At Sears, jeans sales are still strong, but at the more upscale Carson, Pirie Scott department store, "We're in the cycle right now where fashion is becoming more important," says the chief executive officer Dennis Bookshester. For every Carson's basic blue jeans customer, there are five for fashion jeans.

If younger customers are going in for heavy costuming, theatrical makeup and thrift-shop freak, their elders seem to be in the mood to dress rich. "The sense of community and liberalism that blue jeans symbolized is no longer in fashion," observes Novelist Alison Lurie, author of a deft study of fashion, The Language of Clothes. "In the blue jeans and T shirt costume, you couldn't tell a millionaire from an auto mechanic. Jeans identified you with an entire generation, not a particular group, race, nationality or sex. But the rich don't want to blend in with the working class any more. We want clothes that flaunt our individuality, that show off our status, and the rich want to stand out." Having Calvin Klein's name or Gloria Vanderbilt's signature attached to the hind portion of a pair of denims is one way to stand out a little bit, but moniker flash may also be passing away. The Gloria Vanderbilt people, for example, admit guardedly that there has been a sales plunge in their basic jeans model. But as much money as they pulled down for a few seasons, designer jeans were always a joke, just a fussy vamp--usually snug around the butt and thighs--on a basic, utilitarian garment. The only different thing was the logo.

For knock-around wear, jeans are in a very stiff competition with muscle-tone fantasy and military madness. The pipestem ideal has been phased out by the beefy silhouette best paraded in a bevy of unisex exercise duds, from tank tops and crotch-clutching shorts to billowing workout pants and pastel sweatshirts. There are T shirts and flight jackets made of parachute silk by the gifted British designer Katharine Hamnett. The elaborate, intricately detailed pants concocted by Marithe and Francois Girbaud, whose various lines, made in the U.S., Europe and Japan, are characterized generally by looseness of fit, sternness of fabric and an abundance of detailing. The simple functionality of jeans has, for the moment, been displaced by daunting arrays of tabs, Velcro closings, double pockets and looping drawstrings, so that the wearer, having mastered the intricacies of donning such a garment, emerges not as an urban cowboy but as an urban guerrilla, ready for a street fight in the great fashion war.

Jeans manufacturers are battling back by the time-honored commercial expedient of working both sides of that same street. Thirty percent of Lee's line is now fashion jeans, which feature snappy colors and snazzy fabrics. Levi's, keeping its "older cohort" in mind, will turn out stuff specifically for them: not, as might be expected, denim editions of Roman soldier gear, but a line of shirts, sweaters and slacks designed by Perry Ellis. Brooke Shields is fronting her own line of sportswear and highlights a kind of prefab insouciance. With all this, however, tradition will not be forsaken. "People always come back to basics," insists Hervey. "There is no more practical piece of apparel than a pair of cotton denim jeans. They give you a good, free feeling of comfort." This year Levi's will spend $36 million to promote 501s, those reliable, prototypical jeans that shrink, curl, give and finally smooth out on the body as if they were cut to order. There has already been a blitz of 501 ads during the Olympics. Whatever else they may have accomplished, these ads served as a reminder that despite fashion's moment-to-moment whims, there are other things American besides athletes that should be considered world class. --By Jay Cocks. Reported by Thomas McCarroll/New York and Dick Thompson/San Francisco

With reporting by THOMAS McCARROLL, Dick Thompson