The Couture Jean: A Timeline from 1997 to Kaia Gerber’s Beaded Valentinos

On paper, there should be a disconnect between haute couture, which is made for the .001%, and work-a-day jeans. Though humble in origin, denim has become so ubiquitous that the authors of Global Denim, a scholarly book on the subject, report, “perhaps the majority of the entire population of this planet is wearing blue jeans on any given day.” If you believe that one of fashion’s functions is to be a kind of mirror to the times, that staggering statistic is exactly the reason why jeans should have a place on those rarified runways. They speak to the casualness and comfort of modern attire.

In the early post-war period, known as the Golden Age of couture, shows could last an hour or longer and consist of more than a 100 looks, for sunup to sundown. Over time, and as the audience for couture shrunk, the shows started to take on more of a marketing function and the emphasis shifted to special-occasion looks.

More recently, a number of designers have started addressing that imbalance and designing for daylight hours as well. One of the inflection points of the fall 2023 couture season was Valentino’s show opener, a pair of trompe l’oeil jeans made of silk gazar embellished with beads in 80 hues of indigo. (There was a pair of denim jeans with gold embroidery in the line up as well.) Here was a marriage of ease and glamour achieved with painstaking artisanal savoir-faire. It’s the kind of paradox that Pierpaolo Picciolo delights in. And it got me thinking about other examples of denim or denim-like materials on the couture runways.

The first example I could find was from Jean Paul Gaultier, who has always resisted bourgeois rules and morés in favor of freedom. The Frenchman established his own maison de couture in 1997 and his debut collection included denim worked as any luxury fabric would be. A long skirt, for example, featured the kind of floral embroidery you might have seen at court in Marie Antoinette’s day.

Some of the jeans in that 1997 Gaultier show were upcycled. Ronald van der Kemp has based his couture career on a reuse approach, and when Demna relaunched couture Balenciaga in 2021, he created a bridge between past and present, by working denim into architectural shapes.