Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944

There is perhaps no other fabric so inextricably associated with a country as is denim with the United States of America.

his volume traces the origins of this shift through a compendium of photos, drawn primarily from the archive of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), featuring American workers in denim. In both black and white and color, we see ordinary American laborers in the fields, dam construction workers, women toiling on the Chicago railroad, unemployed miners and steelworkers preparing the country for war, all donning denim overalls, jeans, jackets and shirts. The selection of 250 images represents an incredible feat of curation, drawing from an archive of over 170,000 images containing well-known stories and untold histories, but which has never been looked at through the prism of fashion history before.