Levis 1955 cut original

[Madder_Lake]

Here is a curious tale of 1955-cut Levi’s in a far-flung corner of the world.

In 1972 I was seventeen and my girlfriend of the time decided that I needed new jeans — stylish jeans, not the stuff that I was wearing at the time, but the kind of jeans that her older brother and his friends had just discovered: Levi’s. This was in Adelaide — a remote city on the Southern coast of Australia. Information about the outside word trickled in pretty slowly: we were up to date on music but we really had no idea how the rest of the world was dressing, apart from what we saw in music clips. But many had seen the cover of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush and some had decoded it: they were Levi jeans.

So my girlfriend took me to a tiny shop in some very distant suburb and I bought my first pair of Levi jeans. They were completely unlike the jeans that I had bought up to that time: very dark indigo with a super high rise. I wore them everyday of that summer and then many days thereafter (we were not allowed to wear jeans to school).

About the same time my personal discovery was writ large across the asses of almost every other teenager that I knew: Levi’s suddenly exploded — my girlfriend was only slightly ahead of the curve. Suddenly these jeans were everywhere and girls wore them very tight, shrunk to fit every curve. This was a city where a lot of the kids were into surfing and the uniform de jour was a horizontally striped patterned tee-shirt called Golden Breed and high rise Levi’s. In the winter were added Ugg boots, which had just been invented and in the very city in which I lived (so we were at least first with something). This is one of the enduring images of my teenage years: girls with long blond hair, skin tanned by the sun, wearing short cropped striped tee shirts and fitted, faded, high-rise Levi’s. The tee’s were either tucked into the jeans or were short, so that they floated around the waistband of the jeans. It looked amazing and, even though we didn’t know it at the time, we were probably the only kids in the world who dressed this way.

Because, what we didn’t know was that the Levis we were wearing were the 1955-cut that had been superceded in the U.S. in 1966 by a new design. How it came about that some seven years later we were buying the 1955 cut I do not know. Maybe there were vast warehouses in Australia of unsold stock; or maybe Levis in America dumped their old stock of the 1955 cut onto the export market and they wound up in Australia. But I do know that for about three years, from 1972–5, these 1955-cut Levis became the only jeans anyone wanted to wear. The soundtrack may have been Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust but the look was sea-salt and faded denim.

For me something peculiar happened. I became in love with the way these jeans faded (truthfully, I didn’t love the high rise so much: it always looked better on girls). But at every stage these jeans looked better and better: the way the deep indigo contrasted with the whitened areas was a kind of magic. I began to take careful notice of how others jeans faded as well, and some that had hardly ever seen the inside of a washing machine looked even better than mine. And I was not the only one who was doing this — there grew up a secret cult of faded jeans. No one could really afford more than two pairs of jeans so all jeans were worn hard and everyone admired the fadings on everyone else's jeans. And only these Levi’s seemed to fade in this special, magical way. For me that fading seemed to speak of a kind of existential seriousness, of life seen clearly and without distortion. And in truth this is probably how many of us here see it today.

Anyway, all of this crashed down slowly some three years later: our late-blooming cult of Levis exhausted the supply chain stock of the 1955 cut and suddenly, around late 1974, we were faced with a new cut of the jeans. At first probably few noticed that there had been a change — though I think the girls were first to notice that the new jeans were not as high. But word began to get around that these new jeans were ‘not the same’. Indeed they were not. The new jeans did not quite look the same and they did not feel the same, and some time later, we realised that they did not fade the same either. My first pair of the 1966-cut were actually pretty good, but every pair thereafter seemed to be just a little bit less interesting than the one before. And this continued on for some twenty years. And in the end, after two and a half decades of brand loyalty, I gave up. The extraordinary magic of that special concoction of indigo and denim that was the 1955 Levi would not be found in a pair of off-the-shelf Levis.

But it is strange to think, and Levis the company probably have no idea this happened, that seven years after they deleted the 1955 cut they had this bizarre flowering at the other end of the Earth.

Feel free to share any stories that you have of wearing the 1955 cut.

[rufio]

Awesome story. My dad grew up in Adelaide in the 70s, so he probably wore them too.

[Madder_Lake]

Awesome story. My dad grew up in Adelaide in the 70s, so he probably wore them too.

Thanks rufio --- maybe run it past him and try to get his recollections. If he's not too young he will probably remember 72 fashion.

[aho]

Re-posted for you in the LVC thread...Love stories like this, utterly fascinating...

[Madder_Lake]

Re-posted for you in the LVC thread...Love stories like this, utterly fascinating...

thanks aho --- before the days when fashion went global I imagine that there are many such weird stories.

[beatle]

Madder - this thread will be lost in no time.

Please repost your story in Levis Vintage clothing - it makes more sense there...

[Madder_Lake]

Madder - this thread will be lost in no time.

Please repost your story in Levis Vintage clothing - it makes more sense there...

Thanks beatle but aho has already posted it there for me.

[wasabi]

please post pictures of your 40 year old levis

[Madder_Lake]

please post pictures of your 40 year old levis

Ahhh, man, I wish I could but they disappeared some years ago. I'll post pics of a well worn later pair on the evo thread though.