Blue Jeans at the End of the World

Nearly fifty years after the 505 first appeared, Debbie Harry is standing in the Bowery Ballroom telling anyone who’ll listen that denim represents America. When the wall fell and the Eastern Bloc collapsed, she says, the kids there only wanted one thing: blue jeans. It sounds like a bumper sticker until you actually think about it—and then it sounds exactly right.

The Levi’s 505 came out in 1967, right in the middle of the California cultural explosion everyone still romanticizes. It peaked in the punk scene of the ’70s, worn by Harry herself and the Ramones, which is a more or less unimpeachable credential. The 505C is the current iteration—cut for the present, carrying all that history in the weave.

The launch party at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan drew the kind of crowd that looks effortlessly cool in photographs: Zoë Kravitz, Matt Katz-Bohen, Lolawolf’s Jimmy Giannopoulos. People who understand instinctively that the right pair of jeans is not a trivial matter. There’s a reason denim became shorthand for freedom in every country that didn’t have it. You don’t need to speak the language. Everyone already knows what the jeans mean.