I've had the privilege a number of times of speaking and/or performing at an annual arts camp in the south of France. Specifically, it's in a rugged, sparsely populated region known as Ardèche, named after the river that flows through it.
For centuries, this wilderness was home to thousands of Huguenots, the Protestants who fled persecution under the Catholic monarchs, beginning in the 17th century. There is a long history there of building community amidst hostile surroundings.
One year I decided to visit a small museum in the area which documents much of this history. One display featured a mannequin family of Huguenots, all dressed, to my surprise, in blue denim. It was a bizarre juxtaposition of what looked like 80's stone-washed denim set in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was only then I found out that denim was invented not far from there, and this was a fabric that was readily available to the Huguenots. And where does the word denim itself come from, you ask?
Well, it was blue, and it originated in the city of Nîmes (pron. NEEM), about 100 kilometers south of where I was.
Bleu de Nîmes. (Blue from Nîmes.)
Blue denim.
And where does the word jeans come from? Apparently from the French name for the Italian city of Genoa (Gênes, pron. zhen), which started making the sturdy pants, primarily for workers who needed something strong and sturdy.
The pants made it to America in the 19th century and were used by California gold miners, among others. It wasn't till the 1950's that young people started wearing them, according to this article, as a sign of rebellion. This was encouraged even further with Marlon Brandon's movie "The Wild One" (1953) and Jimmy Dean's "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955).
And that's, as famed radio announcer Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.