There’s science in those jeans
Pioneering high-tech efforts aim to give every style a perfect fit
Steve Zades wants you to demand more from your denim. “If you could just dream for a moment,” asks Zades, the vice-president of global innovation at VF Corporation, which owns brands including Lee, North Face and Vans, “What would you want your jeans to do for you?”
Before you heckle “babysit,” think more along the lines of reallife Snapchat filters: maybe you’d like to look taller and slimmer, perhaps curvier, more athletic. Technological advances have emboldened brands to claim jeans can do just that. Or, as Zades puts it: “What your clothing can deliver is really changing.”
Jeans may have been around since the 1870s, when Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis first punched rivets into men’s denim work pants. But researchers are infusing denim with some high-tech updates. At Wrangler, designers are using digital avatars and proprietary Body Bespoke technology to re-conceive every jean style size by size, all in an attempt to achieve the ideal fit.
“We checked things like how much bigger the pocket needs to be when the jeans are growing by this or that much,” says Sean Gormley, Wrangler creative director. “The jeans are more balanced on different sizes than they ever would have been before.”
At Lee, Zades and colleagues at the VF Cognitive and Design Science Lab have channelled five years of vision-science research into creating more flattering jeans. They’ve done so by applying our understanding of optical illusions to denim, using “anatomy shading ” to highlight areas you’d like to flatter and shadow the parts you’d rather downplay. Think of it as contouring for your bottom: in smaller sizes, they’re creating the illusion of more curves; in larger sizes, toning it down. They’re also fooling the eye with linear perspective (a double-sided seam narrows down to the ankle, for a lengthening effect), laser-cut cross-hatching, a curved yoke and curve-cut, angled back pockets (creating a lifted, apple-bottom look). Despite a cringey name (Body Optix), it’s pioneering stuff. During consumer testing, “People would put the jeans on and say, ‘Wow, I’m meeting the super me,’ ” Zades says.
Creating the super you requires super algorithms — Zades says his team ran through 27,000 possible pocket positions before settling on the ideal placement, all using virtual simulations.
It also takes a robust challenger. The greatest threat to denim over recent years hasn’t come from a denim upstart, but from leggings. Once athleisure went mainstream, shoppers lost patience with jeans that didn’t stretch when they stretched, flex when they flexed or, um, adapt when their waistlines expanded.
Activewear has been one of the few areas of growth in the clothing industry in recent years, with womenswear sales increasing by four per cent to pounds 15.6 billion in the U.S. in 2017 alone, according to the NPD Group market research firm.
Denim brands have responded either by doubling down on what Chloe Lonsdale, the founder of London-based M.i.h Jeans (us. mih-jeans.com) calls “the authentic spirit of denim” (i.e., rigid, non-stretch jeans) or by absorbing athleisure’s lessons and looking leggings-ward with high-stretch jeggings.
Denim is now back on the upswing — sales have rebounded and showed four per cent growth in 2016, the category’s best performance in years — but the sustained popularity of leggings outside of the gym is why you’ll still find so many skinny jeans on the market, years after fashion journalists heralded their demise.
“The really painful tip is to treat jeans shopping like swimsuit shopping,” says Jessica Lawrence, head of brand and design with M.i.h. “If you run into a shop and grab the first thing that you see and then leave, you’re never going to find a pair of jeans you’re happy with.
“So know what kind of denim you enjoy wearing, go into a shop and try a load of different pairs on. Take advice from people in the shop, too.”