Forever in Blue Jeans, Babe - A History of Denim

It may have been the "Serge de Nimes" from the south of France that gave our favourite trouser material it's name, or perhaps it was the "Bleu de Genes" from Italy.  The question is a bit controversial in the minds of those who spend much time thinking of such things. Perhaps it was a little from column A and a little from column B. What is known for certain, however, is that long before Calvin Klein there was denim and it was beloved. 

Our love affair with denim started with those daring fashion renegades, the Genoese sailors. Nothing said "chic" in the 1500's like that perfect fitting pair of jeans that could be worn to swab the decks or shimmy a mast, and talk about versatility! They could be worn wet or dry, pantlegs rolled up or rolled down, and the best part of all? Laundering them was as simple as towing them in a giant net behind the ship. Ahh, for the good ole' days.
 
Well, fast forward a couple hundred years and our beloved blue jeans get a makeover. (Every good fashion craze does need to be updated now and again, after all.) Mr. Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis (who never did manage to get his name on the bum of any pair of pants), joined forces in the 1870's to create the copper-riveted denim pants that all great jeans of today derive from. Let us all take a moment to honour the dear Mr. Strauss and the darling Mr. Davis.
 
It was this great invention (the fastening of pockets to denim pants with copper rivets to make them far less prone to tearing) that spurred the jean revolution. Well, kind of...very slowly, but steadily anyway. Denim jean pants, as they were known, started out as the garb of the worker - the miner, the farmer, the railroad worker, the factory worker. Sturdy and hard-wearing, they couldn't exactly have been called sexy, but they did their job and did it well. 
 
Then came the real revolution. In the 1950's, denim became a symbol of non-conformity worn by teens and young adults questioning the status-quo. Rebel stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis wore their jeans with just the right mix of sex appeal and rugged disregard of social convention. Those who set the social conventions of the day responded very appropriately by banning denim from schools and refusing to admit anyone wearing it to their places of business. A fashion star was born.
 
The 60's and 70's saw the advent of the decorative jean - the bell-bottoms, the embroidered artwork set onto the fabric, the flower power of the day set loose on the growing fashion trend. By this time in their history, jeans had lost their fringe status in North America and were becoming mainstream - no longer risque, they were becoming a wardrobe basic. Around the globe, they became a symbol of American culture.
 
Then came the 80's. Who could forget acid-washed denim and stone-washed denim? There was frayed denim and ripped denim, coloured denim and white denim. And let us never forget the birth of designer denim: Calvin Klein, Armani and Gloria Vanderbilt were the designers of the day. Couture denim had arrived and jeans became forever entrenched in our hearts and closets.
 
Today's denim is truly a wardrobe staple. In styles ranging from casual to elegant, our jeans are inspired works of art. With dozens of top fashion designers with a passion for denim, our jeans have become sophisticated, innovative, fashion-focused masterpieces. 
 
"I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity - all I hope for in my clothes." - Yves Saint-Laurent

S'instyle Women's Wear carries a wide range of denim to fit every body and every budget. While you may not find the 16th century Genoese sailor look and fit, you will find the perfect pair for your lifestyle. Visit our unique designer clothing boutique at: http://www.sinstyle.ca

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Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Brodie

This book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a rich novella that needs to be conquered as if one could! several times; that is, round and around and with noise, as the Israelites conquered Jericho.

Having attempted countless time to form a coherent timeline for this novella, this last time I gave up the idea, deciding that it was easier to do it for One Hundred Years of Solitude. One has to accept the fact that it is that the story has neither beginning nor end, but only a thick Byzantine middle. Yet, it is cogent by virtue of its precise flash forwards, flash backwards, and resonant images; the latter acting as anchors in time.

The resonant images are: the elm tree, a walk through Edinburgh, a fire, transfiguration of the commonplace, and the word menarche.

Given the school setting, it is a book about impressionable high schoolers, and a charismatic teacher: Miss Jean Brodie, a maverick teacher with dangerous ideas. On the surface she seems to be a level-headed, vastly informed, and attractive lady whose strong personality influences students, teachers, and even the headmistress. The reality turns out to be something else: she teaches her pupils the Brodie set to be leaders, the crème de la crème, so that they can "belong to life's elite."

Using the Socratic Method, she attempts to mold her girls into heroines, superior women, superb individualists who'd do for themselves rather than for the group; that is, team effort be damned. A victim of her times (1930s), Miss Brodie admires Hitler and Mussolini, and it is this spirit of Fascism that she instills in the Brodie set.

What the author, Muriel Spark, left behind is a book about negative, autocratic leadership: "my way or no way," "either you are with me or against me." Sandy (Brodie's pet pupil) betrays her, and in the end Miss Brodie is fired from her job for misconduct. Because of the very same education she received from Miss Brody, this betrayal was inevitable. And given that she taught the Set that violence and cruelty were acceptable, the betrayal seems adequate poetic justice.

To discourage love of neighbor, care, cooperation, and harmony, can ultimately create monsters. If there's a moral lesson that can be discerned is that extreme individualism can be harmful to society, while group nurturing is the opposite. In Donna Tartt's Secret History we also see that Julian, an elitist teacher, also attempts to mold superior students, with disastrous results. This is an attitude that goes back to Plato and Socrates who in The Republic advocated a ruler caste.

The result is that elitist teaching creates tyrants. Doesn't it then follow that we should be wary of teachers and schools that prepare unfeeling, insensitive, inhuman leaders?

What is the good of a book if one doesn't learn from it?

First published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, finds itself established as a good novel not because of its inherent goodness, but because of the evil it depicts. Besides the mastery of technique (especially of fictional time), this brief book stands as a negative paradigm of human relations, education, and leadership. Had President George W. Bush, and his advisors, read and absorbed the lessons of this novel, they wouldn't have lectured the world with Bush's loathsome doctrine: "our way or no way," "either you are with us or against us."

Marciano Guerrero
Retired Investment Banker, Corporate Controller, graduate of Columbia University, and Vietnam Vet (1967-1968).

Notice that seldom do I open sentences with either a noun, or a pronoun, or even an article (definite or indefinite). The writing techniques I use in writing stories and articles are all explained in: http://writerivetingprose.com

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Unknown, Friday, March 5, 2010 Kontes seo Eriuqs Spires Healthy Recreation

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Richard Wright - Moving Away From America Transforming Him to an Internationalist and Africanist

In 1946 Wright received an invitation to visit France having just met Jean Paul Sartre in New York. But he had problems securing a passport. He therefore enlists the help of several eminent personalities such Dorothy Norman who beefs up his credentials by appointing him co-editor of Twice a Year, Gertrude Stein, and anthropologist Claude Levi -Strauss the then French cultural attache who sends him an official invitation from the French government to visit Paris for a month. Armed with this, he thus leaves New York on May 1 1946. After he returned to the United States he decided he could no longer tolerate the racism he experienced even in New York City.

He found it intolerable that even though he was married to a white woman and living in the North, he still was not able to buy an apartment as a black man. Furthermore, he hated the stares he and his family received whilst strolling on the streets. And he could not stand his still been called "boy" by some shopkeepers.So he buys an Oldsmobile sedan to take him, his wife and daughter across to Europe. So in 1947 he moved permanently to France and settled in Paris never to see the United States again.

He worked during 1949-1951 on a film version of Native Son, in which he himself played Bigger. Wright, forty years old and overweight, had to train and stretch verisimilitude to play the part of the nineteen-year-old Bigger. The production was fraught with many problems during its filming in Buenos Aires and Chicago. The film was released briefly but was unsuccessful. European audiences acclaimed it, but the abridged version failed in the United States and then the film disappeared.

Wright begins to read more deeply in existentialism including Heidegger and Husserl. During that period he saw much of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and is particularly impressed by Albert Camus' existentialist novel The Stranger which inspires him for the next book after Black Boy which was to be his own "existential" novel, The Outsider, which was published in 1953 to mixed reviews. Cross Damon, the main character in it, is overwhelmed by the demands of his wife, his mother, and his mistress. Seizing a chance opportunity during a train crash, he leaves his identity papers with a dead man and disappears. He ends up committing three murders to save himself, then is himself murdered by the Communist party in the United States for his independence.

Then followed Savage Holiday, a "white" novel whose main character, Erskine Fowler, a psychopathic murderer exemplifying the dangers of repressed emotion followed in 1954. Fowler obsessed with desire for his mother, marries a prostitute, then murders her; in a graphic murder scene which disturbed some readers. The novel unlike Wright's other works has no black characters. It is published as a paperback original by Avon after having been rejected by Harper. Then it was not even a mild critical success in the United States though it is well received as Le Dieu de Mascarade in France.

During the mid-1950s Wright traveled extensively--to Africa, Asia, and Spain--and wrote several non-fiction works on political and sociological topics. He had helped found Présence Africaine with Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, and Alioune Diop during 1946-1948. He spent some time in Ghana and in 1954 published Black Power to mixed reviews. Black Power a title drawn from a term coined by Wright, concerns itself with the color line in Africa and the new "tragic elite," the leaders of the former colonies.

From June to August 1953 Wright travelled extensively in the then Goled Coast which was awaiting independence to do research for a book on Africa. The boat in which he was travelling stops briefly in Freetown, Sierra Leone,( where this writer lives and writes from but unfortunately was yet to see the light of day, so could not have seen him) en route to Takoradi where he disembarks and travels from there 170 miles to Accra, his main destination. There he meets Kweme Nkrumah the then Prime Minister and other members of his Convention People's Party as well as Osei Agyeman Prempeh 11 king of the Ashantis and other traditional rulers.Excursions took Wright from Accra to Cape Coast, Christianborg and Prampan , visiting slave-trading fortresses and dungeons travelling almost 3,000 miles in a chauffeur-driven car, touring the interior from Koforidua to Mampong and from Sekondi-Takorasdi to Kumasi regions. Though Wright shows some fascination for Africans he is reinforced in his sense of self as a Western intellectual. As Ghanaian writer Kwame Anthony Appiah said later Wright failed to understand Africans when he urged Africa to leave tribal custom behind and join the technological era.

On his return from this trip and having given his impressions to George Padmore in London, Wright secures funding for his projected attendance at the forthcoming conference of non-aligned nations from the Paris office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international alliance of anti-Communist intellectuals. In April 1955 Wright attended the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. This was the first meeting of twenty-nine new nations of Africa and Asia. At the Bandung conference he shares room with the missionary, Winburn T. Thomas. Leaders attending include Nehru, Sukarno, Sihanouk, Nasseer and Zhou Enlai. He even speaks with Nehru during the course of the conference. He published his account as The Color Curtain in 1956 (after the French edition of 1955).

After Wright returned from two trips he made to General Franco's Spain, he published a book of his observations, Pagan Spain (1956) in which with his "peasant" understanding he exposes the dark side of violence and moral hypocrisy beneath the national adherence to Catholicism.

In 1957 he put together a collection of his lectures given between 1950 and 1956 in Europe, White Man, Listen!, which includes "The Literature of the Negro in the United States," an important overview. During the 1950s Wright grew more internationalist in outlook. While he accomplished much as an important public literary and political figure with a worldwide reputation, his creative work did decline principally because he had lost contact with his base for long thus depriving his work of the pscychological and emotional weight of black life as lived in America..

Born and schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Arthur Smith has taught English for over thirty years now at various Educational Institutions. He is now a Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing for the past eight years.

Mr Smith's writings have been in various international media like West Africa Magazine, Index on Censorship, Focus on Library and Information Work, myfreearticlecentral.com, freeonlinelibrary.com, mabaylareview.org and nathanielturner.com . He participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.

His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and 'The Struggle of the Book'

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