It's official, the bottom has fallen out of the jeans market. Denim was once seen as the very embodiment of post-war consumer capitalism chic, but it is now having a rough ride in the choppy waters of contemporary fashion wear.
A report compiled for the clothing industry by the researchers AC Neilsen, has found that annual jeans sales have fallen from 23 million in 1996/1997 to an estimated 17 million in 1998 - the first times sales of jeans have shown a decrease since they became a ubiquitous fashion item.
The signs are that jeans are a victim of their own success. What was once a cool and vaguely subversive piece of clothing is now the favoured "casual" look of choice for most everybody and the dreaded "Jeremy Clarkson" effect - referring to overweight middle-aged men thinking that they look a bit sexy in a pair of 501s - has taken its toll.
The image of jeans was quite possibly dealt a fatal blow when Tony Blair was spotted on camera wearing a pair.
The original semiotic value of a pair of blue jeans came from a pioneering, wild west American image - not so dissimilar to that of the rugged, outdoor Marlboro man. Jeans traded on youthfulness and a sense of raciness. With James Dean and Marlon Brando being early walking advertisements for the product, they swiftly became a must-have teenage fashion.
The boom years for denim were back in the 1980s when sales increased by an average of 10 per cent a year. Vigorously marketed, usually using a combination of music and nostalgia, Levi jeans reported an increase in sales of 800 per cent during the 1980s when it used Marvin Gaye's song I Heard It Through The Grapevine as part of its panglobal advertising campaign. Levi alone makes 200 different styles of jeans and between 1984 and 1997 the company's market value increased 105 times - almost as much as computer-softwear giant Microsoft. Such was the demand at retail level for the garment, that even the more haute couture fashion houses forgot about their snobbery and exclusiveness for a while and brought out their own brand of - usually ridiculously over-priced - jeans.
Whether it be Calvin Klein, Donna Karan or the dreaded Dingo jeans, the object of the exercise was to make a garment as cheaply as possible, attach it to a label that gave the right sort of message to the right sort of consumer and look on as millions of people walk around with the name of your company attached to their backside. Money for old hemp.
Amid the massive commercial success though, awkward questions were being asked about the conditions in which jeans were made. Stitched together in hundreds of thousands of low-wage "sweatshops" and private homes around the world, you can tell where some jeans are made by looking at countries like Bangladesh and Turkey where jeans are rarely worn but which import 48 million and 85 million metres of denim respectively.
In Mexico, garment workers earn one fifth to one tenth of the hourly rate paid to their colleagues across the border in Los Angeles and just 2 per cent of the Mexicans are unionised. While the bigger names in the jean industry have embarked on massive PR campaigns to reassure consumers that their product isn't made in slave labour conditions, other companies go globe-hopping in search of the cheapest labour possible.
While such ethical concerns were only picked up on by a small percentage of younger, eco-friendly consumers, they did not help the overall slump in the jeans market. With Levi sales down by 7.8 per cent, Wrangler by 9 per cent and Lee by 12.9 per cent in the last 12 months, a mini-crisis has set in and for the first time the jeans industry has had to watch on as a new trouser cult has stolen its thunder - combats.
It is not just that younger consumers did not want to be seen buying the same fashion product as Jeremy Clarkson, Tony Blair and Ian "Lovejoy" McShane (the three men targeted by the industry as anti-icons), it is that they wanted something a bit more happening and "street" - something that their parents and teachers might not quite approve of. While the baggy, military style, low-pocketed combats may be an utter anachronism in the 1990s (they are, after all, designed for serving soldiers, and the nearest most combat wearers will get to that is playing it on a computer game) they carry with them the same sartorial sexiness that jeans did back in the 1950s. Any hope of a denim revival, with the advent of the new "boot-cut" style of jean, was roundly defeated by the continued dominance of the combat trouser in the younger end of the marketplace.
But it's not as if the denim behemoth, Levi, is suffering too much. Seeing the graffiti on the walls it diversified into sweatshirts, T-shirts, belts and underwear to offset the loss of sales from denim. And strangely enough, its most successful act of diversification came from chasing a slightly older, slightly "squarer" market than a younger, hip one.
The Levi diffusion brand, Dockers - a series of well-cut but otherwise unremarkable cotton trousers - has proved to be their biggest success story in decades. These inoffensive, khaki-coloured slacks have totalled sales of $1 billion (£666 million) in the last five years, with more than 150 million pairs being sold - two out of every three Americans aged between 18 and 49 own a pair. A lot of the success of the Dockers brand is put down to the US penchant for "dress-down Friday" where employees are allowed to wear casual gear to work.
So with combats squeezing jeans from one end and Dockers squeezing them from the other, the only apparent course of action for denim is to sit it out for a few years and then re-invade the market place repackaged as "retro fashion". It's going to be all the rage, apparently.
