Of Forgetfulness & Levi's

I'm minded to be careful about talking politics tonight, as there will be much such chatter going about tomorrow evening, post-elections, anyway; so I'll ignore the subject entirely for the duration. I had a topic vaguely in the offing for this evening's little scribble, but frankly I can't bring it to mind: an all too familiar scenario these days, and one which I'm damned certain is not unique to yours truly. I'll pour another glass and ponder for a while on the matter silently, in like mind as my eighteenth century Herefordshire quaker ancestors. Although I don't suppose they would have used the wine bit of such pondering for a minute... Wine poured, horizon scanned for inspiration, but nope, it's gone; and no amount of mental prodding is going to retrieve that particular thought process any time soon enough for today's epistle to the ether, so a reflection on Levi's jeans it will have to be instead.

When I was growing up and jeans were the mode du jour of trouser for our generation, the brand to be favoured amongst those that knew and cared about such niceties was of course the Levi's 501. Where I grew up in a terraced house in less-than-prosperous Winson Green, few in 1965/66 could have contemplated spending the exorbitant sum of £5.00 - half a weeks wages for most - on a pair, and so the rest of us made do with the cheap and nasty stuff made by companies with weird names like Naytex, at ten bob a pair: that's 50p or half a quid, and hence a tenth the cost of the American product. I was, however, the grateful recipient of a pair of very well worn 501's from my mate Jeff at around the turn of the 1970s, which had been previously owned by Big Pete and his brother Neil before him. These survived, regularly and radically modified - as was the thing then - to be worn by yours truly until around 1974, when little of the original jeans was actually left in evidence, and that acting merely as tenuous substrate to the various patches and gussets they had accumulated over the previous three or four years. They served their time well, methinks.

Since then I've only owned three more pairs of 501s, although many of the other Levi marques have been and gone since, over the years. The last pair of genuine, American-made 501s I bought, however, was in 1979, just before we moved here to North Wales. They were, as anyone old enough to remember recalls, as stiff as plywood and bigger than the quoted size, as they were deemed to be '... shrink to fit... '. Mine never did shrink adequately 'to fit' as I didn't have the facility to boil-wash the buggers at the time; which really didn't matter to me as then the fashion was for 'peg-leg' jeans with turn-ups to show off the famous Levi's red-stitched selvedge, a feature that now only obtains in their hideously expensive 'heritage' 501s produced in Japan or very occasionally in the US. 

Nevertheless, and bearing in mind my relative impecuniousness these days as a retired person, I bought a rather more budget pair of 501s at Ludlow market the other week, and wore them for the first time today when we went out for lunch with another aficionado of the Levi stride, our long-time and very dear friend John from mid-Wales. Yes, they were manufactured in somewhere like Vietnam, and no, they don't have the selvedge on the outer leg seam [I do own a pair of Next jeans that were half the price and do sport the feature]; but these new ones are of a decent weight denim, aren't as stiff as marine ply; and just like the originals, are cut to just the right fit to suit the shape of a normal human male, and are comfortable in all modes of movement, even driving. So ultimate fashion cues aside, they'll do me, methinks. Whether they'll last as long as that legendary first pair of mine is moot, but they might just see me out, anyway...