Oh, Lord. Western popular culture has sent the North Korean commissars into a frenzy of censorship. Have they turned against the lubricious stylings of Megan Thee Stallion? Has Emma Stone’s “furious jumping” in Poor Things finally landed in Pyongyang? No, this is all to do with Alan Titchmarsh’s trousers (now there’s a name for a band).
One could hardly imagine a less threatening figure than that Yorkshire-born shrub wrangler. True, around the millennial years, he accrued a reputation for including “sexy” scenes in his popular novels, but nobody seriously suggested he was any latter-day Marquis de Sade. With his sensible jumpers and unthreatening gilets, Titchmarsh remains the personification of television’s midafternoon cosy tendency. Many biographers of Alan Partridge see him as a key inspiration for that fictional chatmeister (though Patrick Marber, who created Alan with Steve Coogan, told me sports reporter Elton Welsby was the key progenitor). How unlikely to find him at the centre of an international incident.
[ Patrick Marber: ‘I’ve never had a good idea I didn’t immediately regret’Opens in new window ]
Loosen your cardigan. Fan your armpits with this dwarf gardenia. Nothing has burst loose from the Titchmarsh gusset. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is reigniting a fashion war that the rest of the world settled 40 or 50 years ago. It seems that a showing of Alan Titchmarsh’s Garden Secrets on Korean television blurred out the presenter’s jeans. Those garments are, the BBC website tells us, seen as “a symbol of western imperialism”. Stills do not suggest anything bulb-clutchingly tight. Titchmarsh appears to have gone for the looser Clarkson-style jean cut.
“It’s taken me to reach the age of 74 to be regarded in the same sort of breath as Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart,” he commented. “I’ve never seen myself as a dangerous subversive imperialist – I’m generally regarded as rather cosy and pretty harmless, so actually it’s given me a bit of street cred.”
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Were we 107 we might suggest last week’s news confirms the completion of a cycle for the blue jean. Once a symbol of rebellion, the garments have gone beyond general acceptability to become a uniform of capitalist conformity. Oh what an irony. Blah, blah, blah.
When did that happen? Well, a long, long time ago. It is nearly 50 years since Gloria Vanderbilt launched her highly priced brand of designer jeans. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan wore them when in office, but only when riding horses under big western skies (Ron) or when folksily chopping logs with the Allman Brothers Band (Jim). By the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were actually wearing them indoors. There are still golf clubs and workplaces where jeans are prohibited, but the notion those garments convey anti-establishment leanings went out with the eight-track cartridge and the closed shop.
And yet. It is not insane to detect an irony in this arc. For decades denim jeans were workwear for manual employees. The prehistory goes back to Italy and India (it makes sense that the word “dungaree” derives from that country), but the current ubiquitous trouser emerged in close to its present form as a favourite of miners, farmers and cowboys in the United States during the 19th century. Levi Strauss & Co produced the first version of their own famous jeans in 1873.
It took a long time for them to emerge from the workplace and on to the legs of movie stars. By the early 1940s, something called “western chic” was beginning to attract those celebrities, but you wouldn’t catch Joan Crawford wearing jeans anywhere other than on a ranch (or in Johnny Guitar). It was the generation of Marlon Brando and James Dean that really launched the garment as a youth cult. In Rebel Without a Cause, Dean is distinguished from the older generation by both his surly attitude and his taste for red windbreakers and blue jeans. This was an era when a fellow was expected to cast off such garb when adulthood loomed.
[ Forever in blue jeans - ups and downs of a pair of denimsOpens in new window ]
The notion of jeans as a cultural indicator – the preserve of anti-war protesters and sociology lecturers – continued throughout the 1960s, but, a decade or so later, semioticians would struggle to find any meaning in their appearance. By the 1980s, they had become so unremarkable that, in a move of Machiavellian brilliance, Levi had to reinvent the “501″ (something nobody outside the business had then heard of) as a much-beloved classic that, flogged in gorgeous retro ads to the accompaniment of Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, cost as much as a pair of fine gaberdine slacks. The jeans worn by miners. The jeans worn by biker gangs. The jeans worn by the Trotskyists handing out leaflets at railway stations. Those jeans had been remodelled as luxury items.
On reflection, perhaps the North Koreans are on to something. Titchmarsh and his trousers really are embodiments of imperial decadence. Pixelate away.
