Cuffed jeans are cool. Very '50's rockabilly, which is still the coolest style.

Cuffing your jeans isn't necessarily out; it's all in how you do it.

And after a night out you may find peanuts or pretzels in them!

Who cares? Who are you trying to please?

Jeans used to be made with longer standard inseams for given waist sizes, for a reason. You rolled up the cuffs when you first got them, and kept doing so as you washed and wore them, until you needed a patch for your seat or knees, at which point, you cut off the material you had been rolling into cuffs, and patched your jeans, like everybody else with any sense did. People whose jeans don't have cuffs don't expect to need patches.

Silly poseur wabbits.

You see John Wayne's early Westerns, from 1932 to 1938, and he's generally sportin' 6" cuffs, outside his boots. If it was good enough for the Duke, is it good enough for you?

Screw the fashionistas! Go 180 out! Tightroll those jeans! Better yet, get some pleated jeans to tightroll!

paulsc:can you be more specific? when was this? Who made these jeans? When did it stop, and why?

I've worked with a lot of historic costume, and I've never heard of such a system. In fact, when jeans were used as work pants only, a cuff was not desirable because of the obvious safety problems. In a quick look around, I couldn't find any pictures of John Wayne with cuffed jeans on (though most pictures don't show his feet anyway).

What did happen was that men's pants sold as ready-to-wear were sometimes sold with no hem at all, allowing the wearer to sew in the hem where it was needed, according to his height. But even that has been extremely rare since the early part of the 20th century.

The 1940s and 50s fad of wearing jeans too long and cuffing was just that - a fad. The jeans were bought too long to allow for the generous cuff.

Shane, you may want to consult James Sullivan for expert advice. Still, the best advice is to wear what you like with aplomb.

I found a "lost" hard contact lens once because it had fallen into a pants cuff. It was like a miracle!

I remember slipping peas and corn into my cuffs at the dinner table.

I don't know if what paulsc says is true or not but it's a really intriguing theory.

Here are some pics of JW with cuffed jeans:

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Not sure if these are jeans or not: link

Yeah, I just found some stuff saying that cowboy fashion as depicted in 30s Hollywood included folded cuffs. That disappeared in the 40s with wartime restrictions on fabric use, but reappeared as rebel-wear in the 50s, with exaggerated cuffs -- in a workwear echo of what happened with the Dior 'New Look.' Look! We can have all the fabric we want!

Still, if actual cowboys did this, I'd love to know why. It had to be just fashion - it's not an intentional part of jeans design, as Levi's patent shows.

I'm wondering if the cowboy-move fashion was meant to suggest independence from women -- because they wouldn't have been around to hem the jeans. It's still a stretch, though - sailors were from a male occupational culture, and did their own hemming (and sewing, and knitting). However, sailors are more accustomed to textile arts as a result of sail mending and making.

There's a nice fashion history monograph here somewhere.

It doesn't take long to burn out on jeans sites. There are entire forums where men are discussing this exact question (cuffs or no cuffs, what kind, how to roll, doubled over or no, selvedge or sewed hem, how many inches). There seem to be a fair number of guys out there paying between $500 - $10,000 for vintage Levi's....

Another interesting tidbit: one historical clothing site says that Levi's red tab was the first-ever brand label to appear on the outside of a piece of ready-made clothing.

(anyway, his jeans are clearly hemmed in the pic. A strange business in which the key question is: was this just a movie meme, or did cowboys really wear extra-long jeans, and why? It's a mystery, I'm sure there's a fascinating answer, and I'm going to bed.)

In my entire life as a Canadian I've never seen a contest where you don't have to answer a "skill testing question."

Around 1980 when I was in public school I sent in the wrapper from a Mr. Big chocolate bar and won a Wayne Gretzky "99" jersey that would probably be worth a lot now but I wore maybe twice and didn't give a shit about. I remember I had to answer a skill-testing question.

Ha! Boy, I'm drunk.
So the wrong thread.

Do it Doggie(patch) style. (O' course, it heps if'n yer sweetie wears li'l ole Daisy Dukes too!)

I think you can get away with rolled-over jeans if, like The Duke, you're 6ft 4. At my height it makes me look like one of those Toulouse Lautrec impersonators shuffling on my knees.

"paulsc:can you be more specific? when was this? Who made these jeans? When did it stop, and why?"

Marion Robert Morrison as John Wayne as "Stony Brooke" in several of the Republic Pictures The Three Mesquiteers Trio Western potboilers, might be a place to look further, if you want to see rolled cuff jeans in action. 55-60 minutes each of rootin'-tootin' Saturday matinee action, featuring some of the sweetest horse ridin', gun shootin', and bar fightin' ever filmed. John Wayne still did a lot of his own stunts, and there wasn't any "effects" work, although there was some professional "stunt" work. Scroll down the linked page for photos of Wayne in his big cuffs, same as the rest of his screen pals. But it wasn't just a studio costume hung on John Wayne and his pals. You see the same thing on Gene Autry, and other film cowboys, who had real experience on working ranches, going back to the start of silent pictures. And I've even seen pictures of Wild West show performers of the 1890's, with their pants cuffs rolled up. Rolled up cuffs weren't the suggestion of some Hollywood costume designer with a new fashion idea, they were what real guys did with 4 to 6 extra inches of fabric on the ends of jeans legs.

I was a Western bootmaker for years, and after that, I sold automatic patch pocket setting machinery, waistband and fly assembly stations, belt loop machines, bartackers, riveters, felling machines and many other items to every Levi Strauss, Wrangler, Dickie, and Lee plant in the U.S., when they were still manufacturing in the States. I've seen, literally, tens of thousands of pairs of jeans made, made several hundred pair myself, and talked to hundreds of people in the Levi Strauss organization, as well as Wrangler and Lee, about patterns and every other aspect of jeans manufacture. So perhaps you'll pardon me if I don't take your comments about cuffs being a safety hazard too seriously. The bit about the extra fabric from the cuffs being a selling point came from conversations with Bill Williams, a long time employee and quality man for Levi Strauss, in the northeastern Arkansas plants, before they closed. He only made Levi's jeans for 53 years, though, so maybe he didn't know much either.

In the early days, before the adoption of electrically powered cutting machines, or modern numerically controlled cutting systems, cloth wasn't layed out in the high ply long table methods of today, and patterns weren't cut with as tight a pattern nesting as is possible today. Work pant patterns were cut generously, but in only a few lengths typically. 34" inseam was a standard length for most "Nevada" pattern Levi pants of 1870 and early 1880's, which is about as far back as it goes. Here's about the best copy of a Nevada pattern pant being made in the U.S. today. But don't forget that there were lots of people besides Levi Strauss making and selling work pants out of cotton duck, canvas and denim from 1860 on. It wasn't just Levi cutting 34" inseams for a market whose average height was about 5'9" in the 1870's, when a 29" or 30" inseam was a very long legged guy. And so I don't think any jeans manufacturer "stopped" making long straight legged jeans, so much as they added both shorter and longer cut lengths, and continued to change the patterns and size grading of their products subtly over time, to cover the needs of a populace that is still becoming a larger and larger range, from smallest to biggest, as I write this.

Another thing that really determines the practicality of turned up cuffs on jeans is the degree of "pegging" of the pattern. Some jeans are reversed pegged, or "bell bottomed" which was originally a Navy style feature. It made it quick and easy for sailors to pull their pants legs clear up to their knees when swabbing decks or wading in bilges, but it's not easy to "cuff" a pair of "bell bottoms." "Straight leg" jeans are the best for neat rolled cuffs, as the legs don't taper below the knee, making rolling cuffs that stay put possible. "Boot cut" or full peg jeans decrease in circumference below the knee, to fit tightly around the ankle, the idea being that they can more easily go inside the tops of Western boots. They're not practical as work pants, because the tight fit on the leg tends to keep them from riding with the seat when a person bends or stretches, but they are popular with women and fashionistas, because they flatter the leg. You'd never roll up boot cut jeans much, even if you tried, because the small diameter openings at the ankle wouldn't allow much turn.

Like half a dozen styles or features of every article of Western wear, the rolled pant cuff was adopted as a useful ubiquitous style for good reasons, by practical people. The rolled pant cuff has always been a choice of some working cowboys, and still is. The choice was whether to stuff your pants in your boots, or roll 'em up to clear your spurs and stirrups. Guys with thick calves usually found it better to roll up cuffs. Cowboys riding with the kinds of roweled spurs and spur straps you use to break horses, and excite bulls for rodeo, rolled up their pants to keep clear of their spurs. As far as your assertion that Wayne's rolled up cuffs in the above photos were "hemmed" somehow proving some point you want to make, they're actually roll finished and through stitched, to prevent raveling. Another way it was done in the 1870's was roll finished, and blindstitched by hand. That's still how I do my own, after ripping out the stock machine finish of the legs on a new pair, when first I get them home. Prevents the legs from twisting or curling in wear, due to the elasticity of a double picked blindstitch.

Here's another illustration from the Montana Historical Society showing a prospector panning with his pants "highwatered." Miners often did that, not only to keep 'em dry, but to keep 'em from become frazzled quickly by dirt, rocks and mud in the diggings.

I wouldn't be caught dead in jeans without cuffs. I still miss my silk-screened flame cuffs on the jeans I spent days taking out so that my bum & thighs would fit (they were a size 13!).
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What's so funny about peace, cuffs, and understanding?

Paulsc's practical point still holds true today, if you buy selvedge or vintage jeans - they start off too big, and hopefully end up just right, so you have to start with a cuff (I tend to get mine over-long so I still have a one-fold cuff when the jeans are falling to pieces, and patch from completely wrecked old jeans - so I guess I'm a practical poseur!).

I really want a pair of these jeans, but the s-m-l sizing scares me.

Thanks, paulsc, your details clarify matters somewhat, although they don't address my central question. Basically, the reason I got curious is that I questioned this assertion:

People whose jeans don't have cuffs don't expect to need patches.

Although clearly cuffs arose at some point associated with cowboying, I don't think there is a practical, systemic, cause-and-effect reason such as this. I don't believe, in other words, that extra length was built into the design intentionally to provide patch material. That idea bears the hallmarks of lore. Instead, your link to Jack Ass Jeans seem to say that, to the degree that cuffs existed, it was a byproduct of the standard 34" inseam cut: "Length is 34 inches. If you need 'em shorter, do what they did in 1870 and roll them up." In other words, the manufacturer was not intentionally providing a handy supply of extra patch material. Extra material just happened (unless you had a 34" inseam).

"Boot cut" or full peg jeans decrease in circumference below the knee, to fit tightly around the ankle, the idea being that they can more easily go inside the tops of Western boots.

Also, minor point: boot cut jeans do not decrease in size; they flare at the hem to accommodate the boot and are worn outside the boot. Tapered jeans decrease in size at the ankle and are worn inside the boot).

I've even seen pictures of Wild West show performers of the 1890's, with their pants cuffs rolled up.

I've done considerable historical research on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and I haven't seen very much photographic evidence for rolled cuffs at all. In fact, the riders most often wore buckskins, U. S. Cavalry uniforms, or traditional wear rather than jeans. The show featured not just American cowboys, but cassocks, caballeros, and other international riding stars, and they were costumed appropriately. It may be that there are a few photographs out there showing riders with rolled cuffs, but I can't find any in either print or online references right now, and since I've seen a tremendous amount of Wild West Show photography I can assert that if there were rolled jean-cuffs, they were extremely rare. The pictures of riders in American Western dress almost universally show pants tucked into the tops of high boots. When the boots are covered it's by buckskins. I've spent a few minutes searching for rolled cuffs in pictures of Wild West Show stars Texas Jack Omohundro, Ned Buntline, and Bill Cody himself, and rolled cuffs are thin on the ground. Photos of the contemporaneous 101 Ranch show depict the same attire. This could indicate they really weren't in fashion yet. A search of images from the early silent Westerns of the 'teens and twenties, such as Hell's Hinges show pants either tucked in or ankle-length, not rolled. Even Tom Mix, arguably the earliest cowboy movie hero, was usually depicted wearing his pants tucked in. Gene Autry is mostly shown in photos with his pants tucked in.

I can see that some of the 30s movie cowboys did indeed wear rolled cuffs, but I'd still need to see photographic evidence of real cowboys wearing cuffs at work, away from the studio/pop culture conception of how they shold look, to believe it was common before the 30s. It can be difficult to tell whether the movies were influencing popular fashion or vice versa; cowboys are American national heroes, and as such they have such a strong pull on our imaginations that their depictions are usually layered in myth. It could be that rolled cuffs were associated with round-the-stable mucking-out work, so they don't appear in a lot of riding scenes or formal photography. It could certainly just be that the fashion arose among actual cowboys in the 30s and was reflected in the movies - some sources mention the popularity of dude ranches as another influence on this fashion. Certainly, part of the reason for the popularity of cuffed jeans was that kids were imitating movie heroes.

Basically, I'm saying: 1. I haven't seen evidence that rolled cuffs were common until at least the 1920s, and 2. I haven't seen evidence that rolled cuffs were engineered into pant design to provide patch material.

Without doubt, the varying popularity of cuffs is an interesting subject of study. People are both resourceful and faddish, and it's neat to see how an excess of material could be put to both practical and expressive use, but I think the vagaries of cuffing/not cuffing, and how cuffing should be done are just as complex as the history of jeans styling and clothing in general. Few things in history, fashion history not excepted, boil down to a simple reason.

Should've gone here first, but a wealth of evidence for late 1800s - early 1900s Western wear is, of course, at the American memory site.

History of the American West

Prairie Settlement

Buckaroos in Paradise

Fun playtime! Who loves ya? The LoC!

I hate cuffing, but I'm also short, so all my jeans end up with cuffs rather than let them fall under my heel and get torn up. Perhaps I should start wearing platform heels more often.

Paulsc, do you have diagrams or some other instruction-type stuff about how to do the blindstitched hem you're talking about upthread? 'Cos I think I'd like to try that.

Kellydamnit, it also says the jeans are dry-clean only! Can you imagine?

I'm too short for cuffs. The last thing I need is to look shorter!

Everything they sell says dry clean only. They're just denim, though (albeit stretch), so I can't imagine what they would need to be dry cleaned for. Maybe to keep them from fading?

Casarkos, you can also bring them to a tailor for that. A lot of dry-cleaning places can do alterations or refer you to someone who can.

Yeah, kellydamnit, those jeans are adorable, but how could they fit like that with generic sizing, even with stretch denim?

That's the new thing now- those expensive jeans are dry-clean only. And they come in one length- extra extra long long, and you're supposed to have them tailored! I stubbornly refuse to pay over $100 for a pair of jeans that is yards too long (I have short legs and a long torso, so pretty much all jeans are too long), though I probably should give it up, since ole reliable GAP has stopped making good jeans that fit me properly :-(

I do think it would be fun to get custom-cut jeans. Nothing looks better than a great-fitting pair of jeans, and they're so hard to find.

Do I smell popcorn?

Wait, they're supposed to be too long for you? And then you're supposed to shill out for alterations? I'd rather learn how to tailor stuff myself, and then people can pay ME.

(TPS, am so with you on that GAP thing. Grrr.)

Come to my house, it's fun to tailor jeans (even adding fabric when you want to be able to get into them) when you have friends doing the same. :)

if your jeans have no selvedge (and if they're cheap or non-vintage, they don't), don't turn up your cuffs -- you'll just look lame.

if they do, go nuts.

Do I smell popcorn?

Yep - it's $12.50 for the Jumbo size, but refills are always free!

Miko, it's fun, as always, to see you spin dust devils chasin' your own tail, sorta. It's not fair of you, rhetorically, to take a simple statement of mine

"People whose jeans don't have cuffs don't expect to need patches."

and imply that I somehow meant that the only reason for existence of the extra length of traditional jeans legs was to provide patch material, but let that go, in recompense for the sport you provide. I'll leave to others with the necessary patience to explain to your academic satisfaction in every instance why it's silly to expect to divine a single "true" reason for the extra length of denim commonly included on work pants, when the original pattern makers neither recorded any such, or denied it, for virtually any traditional derivative element of their patterns. Almost everything about jeans manufacture is a matter of lore, kiddo, and lore though it be, it's no less likely to be true than your lately constructed suppositions.

But I will take just one glaring example of fallacies contained in your implied "research" assertions, which would seem to be that photographs from some period of your interest constitute a truly random sample that capture all the details of period life. Clearly, given the cost, fragility, exposure difficulty, unwieldiness of period cameras, this is unlikely, and your implied assumption contains a confirmation bias that must color your conclusions. Why wouldn't photographers of the period selectively record colorful "buckskins" and "frontier costumes," with expensive and fragile photographic media of the period, in preference to cheap and sturdy clothing of common people in workaday life? Matthew Brady didn't spend a lot his exposures of Civil War scenes on recording healthy veterans of battles marching away in organized retreat columns, yet every single battle of the Civil War had more survivors than casualties. What Brady sold were horrific scenes of death and mutilation that clearly carried his editorial purpose, and what you cite as "evidence" is just as likely postcard stock for the folks back home. In fact, I lied in my previous post, when I said I'd ever seen a picture of Wild West folks with rolled up cuffs, just to see if you'd take the bait. That'd would be the last place I'd look for such, for just the reasons I've now given, and yep, you took the bait.

So if I'm asked to balance your contrived explanations of "history" and your personal "research" against those of the hundreds of people I've known who've actually designed, made and wore the products in question, I'm sure you'll understand if I favor their information, and invite you to remain a legend in your own mind. It's commonsense and general experience that patches for jeans were and continue to be cut from the "extra" fabric of the pants legs, in the same way people normally keep selvage scraps and the ends of trousers and skirts removed at alterations, for the later repair of burn holes and small tears in tailored suits by reweavers, and I don't think there's any need to validate your desires for academic citations, lest I fail to sustain some silly argument you'd like to create. The academic "literature" for fabric and needle crafts is so lacking and of such poor quality, that as recently as the U.S. Civil War, the Federal Government felt the need to issue standardized specifications for Federal Stitch Types to describe how common seaming stitches were made, so as to be able to buy military uniforms by contract. That did not mean that clothes made prior to the 1860s fell apart, or didn't incorporate chain stitches or lock stitches, for the complete lack of attention they had theretofore received from historians of all stripes, for centuries. But it was a measure of the utility of the FST specs, that they remained as the definitive descriptions for seam definitions worldwide, for over a hundred years, until supplanted by Federal Standard 751a in 1965, and since by various ANSI and ISO standards.

But you go girl, ignoring and marginalizing the comments and evidence offered by others as "lore" and putting forward your little collection of Web links as "research," and be happy in prevailing in an argument of your own making. You've vanquished you, again!

"...Paulsc, do you have diagrams or some other instruction-type stuff about how to do the blindstitched hem you're talking about upthread? 'Cos I think I'd like to try that."
posted by casarkos 18 March | 12:24

Here's a mechanical illustration from Singer of a foot and attachment to do this with a conventional lockstitch sewing machine. I do the same thing by hand stitch, approximating an (FST)ISO 103 single thread stitch.

What's not so apparent from the illustration is that a blindstitch is a stitch that is intentionally picked into the face fabric, rather than through it. So, if you use the Singer illustration method with a home sewing machine, it's critical to adjust your "seam allowance" to the presser foot, to pick into the face fabric, rather than through it. It's also usual to use a relaxed upper thread tension and a normal bobbin tension on a normal lockstitch machine, when doing this operation. That way, you get enough relaxation of the stitch not to pucker or dimple the face fabric in lighter weight materials.

paul, history is my profession. The beautiful thing in the study of history is that no one needs to take either my word or your word for the truth. History is a story told based upon evidence, evidence which anyone may see and analyze for themselves, and I've provided plenty of sources of evidence which anyone can get started on, or even spend as much as a lifetime looking through, should they so choose, in order to determine what an accurate account of the fashions of the past might be. I leave it to the intelligence of each individual.

You certainly did throw me a lot of bait. But there's a difference between taking bait and calling bullshit, and I'm pretty sure my work here is done.