Levis 501

As a writer, spending most of my time alone and at home, the occasions on which I have to look “nice” are rare. I have worn jeans virtually every day for the better part of two decades. The same kind: Levi’s 501s.

So I was intrigued to discover recently that in 1873, when Levi Strauss & Co. was awarded U.S. Patent 139,121 for reinforced trousers, the finishing steps of the trousermaking were left up to the consumer. Seamstresses who worked out of their homes were hired to sew together the components of these denim trousers and reinforce them by adding rivets. And what of those California miners and prospectors out there in the wilderness, the first consumers of Strauss’s workwear, unable to avail themselves of the nimble fingers of a seamstress? They would have to manage somehow, sewing, and inevitably mending, their sturdy indigo pants stitch by stitch.

I don’t mean to romanticize what must have been an arduous task piled on top of a host of inconveniences, among them living in a damp and leaky tent, but I am romanticizing it, I suppose. My nostalgia falters a little when I think about the grim necessity that required having to know how to pan for gold in some frigid river, build an unheated sod house, or pull a birthing calf from the steaming, slippery loins of its mother. And yet, I still find myself wishing I had some of those skills. People used to know how to do more things. I cannot help but feel a pang of regret that, along with the greater specialization of knowledge, there has been a general waning of basic competence. My mother—perhaps the most polymathically capable person I have ever known—made all her own clothes while she was in medical school. I, in turn, strive daily to be a desirable addition to any bomb shelter. I cut my own hair; I can make a fire with sticks. I’d gladly skip out on calf- birthing lessons, but I would like to know how to make my own clothes. Luckily for me that would mean learning how to reproduce just one basic garment. Being able to make my own 501s would not only add to my list of postapocalyptic assets, it would open up whole new horizons of thrift and variety (the thought of a pair of green trousers—in velvet or corduroy or Astroturf—has captured my heart, for example).

Seeing as how I have no facility for machines (all my skills are low-tech; I can silver-leaf a table, but I can’t figure out the speed dial on my phone), I decided that I would make my pants employing nothing more than needle, scissors, pins, and thread. I am the most innocuous Ted Kaczynski alive, my anti-industrial posture resulting not in domestic terrorism, but rather in an inadvertent hewing to the strictest codes of couture. Oddly enough, setting up my atelier of one also meant I would be an unwitting and reluctant participant in the current mania for premium and customized denim, a craze in which I cannot feign interest. Trends by their nature evoke suspicion in me, but jeans that cost hundreds of dollars per pair and have ironically egalitarian names like Seven for All Mankind and Citizens for Humanity seem worse than merely faddish. They strike me as obnoxious bordering on hateful.

I am not the market, I know, given my general indifference. I have heard stories about collectors, often Japanese, who pay tens of thousands of dollars for vintage pants. I have heard about connoisseurs’ dating their jeans by the tiny numbers stamped on the backs of the rivets, or examining the colored thread of the selvage as closely as if they were looking for polyps. And my heart goes out to the parents who have had to fork over ridiculous amounts of cash so that their daughters can parade about in jeans strategically creased with “whiskers” around the crotch, jeans that, as she approaches, draw the viewer’s eyes toward her virtue, and, as she retreats, bid farewell with deliberately faded twin circles on her ass, a shimmying umlaut of come-and-get-it sluttiness.

Not that I am a stranger to looking ridiculous myself. Coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I pegged my jeans throughout high school and college. They were never very successful, and often as not I gave up and finished off the second leg with a stapler. I always made them too tapered, ending up with idiotic pants that were elfin and jodhpur-like. By the time I was finished the legs were so narrow that I had to wet them down, stuff them with paperbacks, and let them dry and stretch overnight just so I might get my feet through, and even then only if I was pointing like Pavlova. Eventually, it all just seemed like too much work, both the sewing and the wearing. I gave up and opted for my current uniform: 501s and a shirt. But I was undeterred by my history and lack of sewing skills for this new project. All I had to do was the following:

1. Buy a pair of 501s to serve as a prototype.

2. Take them apart into their constituent pieces.

3. Trace each of those pieces onto brown paper for patterns.

4. Cut out the patterns.

5. Buy—and launder—two yards of new denim.

6. Buy the following tools:

• a seam ripper
• pinking shears to cut into the new fabric
• traditional saffron-colored thread
• fly buttons
• copper rivets
• pins
• proper needles for the denim (thicker and more durable than any of the ones in the many hotel sewing kits I have accumulated over the years)

7. Lay the patterns onto the new denim, outline them with a Sharpie pen, and cut the pieces out.

8. And, finally, sew the pieces together until they looked like a pair of jeans.

How hard could it be? With the possible exception perhaps of Y-front briefs or a plain white T-shirt, I had elected to make the most quotidian garment in the world.

Quotidian, perhaps, but by no means simple. I can’t recall where I started unpicking them, but it was incredibly difficult to take the 501s apart, even using a seam ripper. The stitches were tight and unwavering in their uniformity. Every edge was finished with complex stitching in a pattern both intricate and unmistakably industrial, like the muscular steel filigree of a railroad trestle. They could only have been made by a machine. It took me the better part of two hours to liberate just the waistband and the belt loops. My clothes and the sofa upon which I was sitting were covered in crumbs of orange jean thread. A carnage of fabric, it looked like I’d been using my teeth. Four hours later, I had defeated the monster and I was surrounded by seventeen separate tatters of unrecognizable cloth. I was already at sea. It called to mind a previous do-it-yourself disaster. Many years ago, the publishing house I worked for put out a book for kids called How to Make Your Own Dinosaur out of Chicken Bones. In it, Asperger’s-y tots could learn how to boil down three birds and, using their combined carcasses, construct a tiny apatosaurus skeleton. We had only one finished example, and the call went out in the office to see if folks might undertake some additional prototypes for extra cash. I signed up, fancying myself crafty, bought my three chickens, and went home. The trouble started almost immediately. The structure of the birds disappeared once the meat started to fall away, and I was left with a large pot of cloudy stock with floating threads of ragged flesh, while the disparate, no longer remotely identifiable bones bobbed around in the murky water, a jumble of gray pins. I never did make that dinosaur.

Working on the floor, I dutifully traced the pieces onto brown paper and cut my patterns. I suppose the pieces mirrored those of the original pants, but they looked sloppy and wavy edged. Plus, there were seventeen of them. Seventeen! The immensity of the task was starting to make itself felt, and the forty dollar outlay for the 501s seemed like a true bargain.

Unless I took some shortcuts, I would be sewing until I died. That stapler was looking far too attractive. I made some executive decisions: none of those double-sewn French seams, for starters. Also, I had no time for ornamental niceties, so out went those back pockets adorned with the trademark double V. As for the very aspect of Strauss’s invention that made his pants unique, I could neither loosen the rivets on the pair I’d taken apart as my prototype, no matter how I pried, banged, and hacked away with pliers and hammer, nor could I find new ones to affix to my own creation, so thoroughly industrialized has the jeans business become. The fellow in the shop where I bought my thread offered to put them on for me, but orders started at a minimum of 100 pairs. So no rivets. And I would also repurpose the belt loops from the existing jeans—life is too short to make belt loops. Ditto the fly.

Almost nothing evokes the essence of blue jeans better than the contrast of regular golden stitches against indigo cloth. My first hem, however, on the front of the right leg, was a drunken line of uneven dots and dashes—Morse code spelling out the message “Idiot!” I was the Bennet sister with the least enviable needlework, a sullen, umarriageable thing, sitting glumly by the spinet as Elizabeth flirted with Darcy.

My sewing improved steadily, although I oscillated regularly between perplexing setbacks and great leaps forward. It pleased me to make the front pockets out of dinner napkins pilfered from the TriBeCa restaurant Odeon, circa 1989. But my good vibe went south almost immediately when I turned my work right side out only to find that the pockets looked improvised and lumpy: like swatches from the suit the killer in The Silence of the Lambs made out of his victims. Later, two inches of fabric disappeared from the area near the fly and then, a few hours later, reappeared just as mysteriously. The major problem was that I had embarked on my project with almost no clear plan of action. If something looked like I could accomplish it in the moment, then I tried sewing it. This resulted in lots of partial and separate bits all over the apartment: a yoke attached to the back of a leg, a front pocket lying twelve feet away. After a few days, I realized that if I did not impose some sort of order, I would find myself in the tailoring equivalent of having bricked myself up in my own basement. I started to work on one leg at a time. I would have to join them together when they were finished, but I put that thought out of my head, concentrating on attaching one piece to another.

The jeans became all I thought about. I defaulted on other deadlines. I stopped reading the paper. I was waking up each morning at six, half-blind with headache, my neck and back destroyed from crouching over my sewing. The fingers of my right hand went numb. I didn’t shower for three days. When I did leave the apartment, I scanned backsides and inner thighs, mentally cataloging cut and stitching.

As with any project that takes over one’s life, proprietary pride in my work started to win out. When I did manage to join the legs together (I cannot tell you how I did it; more than any other part, it was an anarchic crapshoot) I let out a whoop of triumph. I immediately unpicked and re-sewed the stitching on the yoke, putting in, yes, a double seam. I could not live with the thought of using someone else’s belt loops. The fly with its edged buttonholes was much easier to make that I anticipated, and it was a thing of beauty when it was finished. In fact, I sewed every single stitch of those niceties upon which I’d said I would not waste my time. For one thing, there is almost nothing superfluous on a pair of jeans. They started as the most indestructible and utilitarian of trousers. Pretty well every seam, every line of stitching, exists for a reason more structural than ornamental (except perhaps for those back pocket Vs, but the pants looked naked without them). I even made a leather patch for the back, my logo a melancholic self-portrait that seemed to broadcast an appropriate weariness, because in the end, my jeans would take me, conservatively speaking, thirty hours to make.

The first time I wore the pants out in public was on a sultry, humid day. Luckily, I’d inadvertently bought thinner-thannormal denim (I experienced the anxiety of extreme hyperchoice at B & J Fabrics on Seventh Avenue and reached for the first bolt I could find), so they were exceedingly comfortable as I walked downtown to meet some friends. So comfortable, in fact, that I kept nervously checking to see that the fly was still buttoned. My friends were duly impressed and charmed by the self-portrait patch, for example, but as they looked at all the stitching and admired the fly buttons, their reactions seem tinged with a kind of why-would-onebother amusement, as if I had just proudly blown my own lightbulbs which, if you think about it, is kind of exactly what I’d done. Might there be another pair in my future? Possibly. The prospect of making more fills me with a sense of happy industry, but I would have to learn how to use a sewing machine, and, given my technophobia, that seems unlikely; and my life, like everyone’s, doesn’t really have a lot of spare thirty-hour windows (although I’m not sure the good people of 1873 had much free time, either). As a costsaving measure, I’d have to look at them as a long-term investment: The price of the pinking shears will be amortized over time, and the hope is that I might work more quickly on subsequent projects. Still, by making my own jeans, I confine any dubious labor practices to my apartment. The only person I am exploiting is me. I will never learn how to build that sod house, but on 16th Street, the ability to clothe my nakedness is far handier anyhow.

And my jeans fucking rock, make no mistake—they look no different from actual jeans, save for a lack of rivets. Actually, that’s not true. They do look different. The evidence of the hand is everywhere— the lines of stitches that here and there meander ever so subtly from their course, like the most peaceful of rivers; the “red tab” fashioned from a piece of grosgrain ribbon salvaged from a long-forgotten gift— but is undetectable even from a distance of two feet away. They are like a photograph that, upon closer examination, turns out to be a cunning picture made out of butterfly wings or dried beans. I find them unutterably cool, almost precisely for how quiet they are. They are a secret I share with myself.