Why do we suddenly all wear jeans now?

Three men walk along a country road. It’s early evening, the light is clear and perfect for photography. They gaze self-assuredly at the cameraman. The gentleman on the left has a touch of unkempt hair, a cigarette dangles from his lips. All have a straight backed posture. This photograph—Young Farmers—was taken in 1914 by August Sander, and the men are off to a country dance. Incongruous with the title, each wears a hat, a suit, and carries a walking stick. In Sander’s portraits of early 20th century Germany, the pattern repeats: farmers and artisans, scholars and lawyers, most choose a two-piece woolen suit. A man in specialized workwear—a chore shirt, an overall—marked themselves as someone who couldn’t afford a suit. Today, we see the reverse: the suit is the costume. Why did this happen?

Like everything else in the world, from countries to concepts, the suit has an origin story. They originated in the late Victorian period as a reaction to the sartorial trend of the day: the morning coat. Today, mostly in deepest England, you might see a man wearing a morning coat on his wedding day, but otherwise they are reserved for the most formal of occasions. Suits, or lounge suits, as they were known, were a casual item of clothing, to be worn in the lounge (if the suit was wool) or in the countryside (if the suit was tweed). It was only later, in the early 20th century, when a suit became the choice for men. As it faded from the height of its power, the suit became the choice for the men who controlled the British Empire: the business leaders, politicians, and members of the Civil Service. The suit was the ideal clothing for deliberation, calculation, and administration. It was made of fabric that draped and moved with the body; it was easy to move about in; it did not encumber its bearer; it got out of the way, yet still retained a little of the casual respectability of London Clubs where it had long reigned. In other words, the suit was the costume of power.

Denim was, as a material, invented to solve a different problem: French workers needed cheap and durable workwear. That’s why cotton was chosen over wool. It could be woven into both soft and durable fabrics. It could be easily repaired. And it was cheap. Perfect for the poorer classes to wear daily. It became an American staple when Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss added copper rivets. These reinforced the stress points—pockets, seams—that would otherwise tear. Denim workwear then became the costume of men who built things. Primarily in the American imagination, they built the American West. It took the countercultures of the 1960s and ‘70s—rejecting the suit as a symbol of corporate conformity—to begin denim’s transformation. By the 1980s and ‘90s, Silicon Valley had completed it: tech founders wore jeans not despite their association with manual labor, but because of it. They were builders, not bureaucrats. The rest of us followed. Whilst wearing a suit marks a man out as an administrator of another man’s empires, in the 21st century denim is the costume of a certain kind of agency.

The real subject of this essay is agency. Tech founders adopted the costume of builders while becoming further removed from actual production than the suited administrators they replaced. The miner in denim jeans did build things. The CEO in designer denim at a product launch doesn’t. The 19th-century miner who wore denim actually extracted ore. The 21st-century founder who wears it… deploys capital and manages teams. The costume of building has been adopted by a class whose work is, once again, calculation and deliberation—just rebranded as ‘disruption.’ When we venerate agency as an unqualified good, we should ask: agency to do what? The suit signaled the authority to think before acting. Denim now signals the authority to act without thinking. Both extremes miss the mark. We need deliberation and execution—not just the costume of either.