Who are the Top All Time Influences of Denim?

Artist Ian Berry asks you to help him find the people who helped shape jeans

From the Cowboys, the 50’s movie stars, the punks, to skinny jeans in the naughties, who has shaped our indigo love?

Artist Ian Berry asks the question who is your Denim Legend? This will help try to get a definitive list to create a final piece with the deserving names. Now, he presents the current results at Textil Museet in Sweden. Here the public can also submit their own thoughts, thus shaping the final piece along with the views of denim experts and those online.

Karl Lagerfeld once bemoaned, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat.” After working from home for so long many may feel that, but as we start to go out exercising our freedoms and try to squeeze into those jeans again, has anyone thought – why?

We’ll stare into a wardrobe whether they’re a cheap fast fashion pair or a premium label and give little thought to how this hard-wearing material, that in many ways made so little sense, became our most favourite fabric and our go-to garment. 

British Artist Ian Berry is creating a piece out of the material where he made his name to celebrate the faces behind the history of the fabric. DENIM. He’s spent the last year asking experts for their all-time Denim Legends from pop culture, along with his own knowledge from working with this material for over 15 years. 

‘I’ve been getting input from my friends in the denim industry and some of the biggest designers. Bear in mind this is mainly history before I was born. Denim has followed the story of pop culture and also that of America. The idea is actually how I started, making portraits on Marilyn, James Dean and Brando – not because they were iconic faces, but because I was aware they were pivotal to the material going from rural workwear to street wear and even.. high fashion.’ 

Ian Berry has already created dozens of portraits all crafted out of the material the subjects made famous. He is now asking more people who should be in, even rejecting some he’s already made to fit more in, from Brooke Shields to Bardot, Marley to Moss, McQueen to the material girl living in her material world, Madonna. But who would you like to see included? Should it be the more well-known musicians of the 50’s and 60’s or the Cowboy actors or those who portrayed the rebel like Dean, Brando, Eastwood and Hopper? Perhaps the sexy leading ladies like Monroe and Lollobrigida. There’s the writers like Beat Kerouac and even artists like Warhol, Pollock and Britain’s Peter Blake who made their own impact. 

At Textil Museet, the national museum of Textiles in Sweden, he has installed a temporary, evolving installation that will change over the period of the show (closing May 1 2022) The installation has many of the portraits made already, but there will be more added especially as he takes in mind peoples views! It is also designed with mannequins dressed with the destictive styles of some of the greater denim legends, like Monroe’s Lee Rider, Brando’s jeans with leather jacket and Bruce’s tight Levis, with that red hat.

‘I’ve made many already, while a lot of the obvious ones are missing. I want to ask more people to help create the final piece and be very inclusive, but also quite strict. Denim is so linked with America and even Hollywood so naturally many are from the USA. I’m interested in who people suggest from their own countries. However, it is what impact they made on the world, and for example I tried to get some from Japan as they are denim mad! That love for the material was also post war and looking toward America and the actors and the American GI’s wearing jeans.’

Ian Berry is correct in saying it was the American Pop Culture that helped spread the jeans revolution. In Japan by the '50s, students started exploring makeshift stores at US military outposts. But what about other regions? Bardot and Halliday in France to Marley in Jamaica and of course the UK is present with 70’s punk to Kate Moss’s skinny jeans. But the question is, who should join them as the all-time influencers of denim?

‘For me it isn’t about fame now. It’s being true to the story and who made an impact then. On my own list I had for example Monty Clift on, then off, then on again. He was one of the biggest names in his day but has now been more or less lost to history. He was a keen denim wearer but when I found out one of the most pivotal moments in denim was down to him. I loved the idea of immortalising him. When Marilyn Monroe wore the denim jacket on the set of Misfits which I think was of the most important moments for women with denim, it was actually his jacket he’d leant to her. Not many people know that.’

Wh0 is in so far?

Now, 1.2 billion pairs of denim jeans are made per year, and the average woman has 7 pairs of jeans in her wardrobe and men 6 at a time (cited by Fashion United) and around 7.5 billion feet of denim fabric is produced every single year. In America, the average consumer buys four pairs of jeans a year. But how did we get here? How did this fabric and garment originally made for hardworking rural workers in gold mines and labourers, become the most common fabric on the high street? 

The answer will be in Ian Berry’s final piece! 

NOTES

• Ian Berry has been making his work in denim for over 15 years. The first year he did such pieces of Marilyn Monroe, Brando, and Elvis. In 2011 he installed a giant piece of James Dean in the 50’s icons hometown of Fairmount, Indiana with his family and the James Dean Museum. In 2013 he made a portrait for Debbie Harry, another strong contender for Denim Legend status. He’s also known for portraits of the likes from designer Giorgio Armani, model Giselle and Brazilian icon Ayrton Senna.

• People can also submit their answers on social media or here https://www.ianberry.org/denim-legends

The Museum

The piece will develop in Sweden at Textil Museet – the national Textile Museum of Sweden where Ian Berry’s Material World show will til 1 May 2022. A collection of the artist’s work over the last decade will be displayed throughout the museum.

https://www.ianberry.org/blog/2021/9/16/ian-berry-material-world-textil-museet-sweden

Ian Berry

Berry is an artist born in 1984 in Huddersfield, a famous old textile town in the heart of the industrial Revolution. A true original and creative force, he sources, then cuts and sticks, countless pairs of jeans and denim jackets and layering them to make photorealistic portraits and scenes out of the indigo dyed fabric. He was named a top 30 artist under 30 in the world in 2013 and was named a top influence on the denim industry in 2019. He has shown his work around the world in galleries and museums and has been published in countless magazines and newspapers. Ian Berry now lives and works in Poplar, East London.

www.ianberry.art