The Thousands

Dell Stewart is curating an exhibition and an accompanying publication called Denim as part of this month’s Craft Cubed festival. She’s assembling a range of artists, designers and craftspeople to create material about the material using the material.

And we’ve sure got a lot of the stuff. Denim is an 11 billion dollar market and the average pair of jeans costs $25. Which tells us that, despite efforts by the fashion industry, denim is still mostly what it started life as: practical and cheap. Workwear. And it’s only becoming more ubiquitous as standards of dress become less formal. (The thirty-fourth richest man in the US, Steve Jobs, seems to wear nothing else. Levi 501s in fact.)

So it stands to reason people want to think about denim. People such as Lyn Balzer and Tony Perkins, Jen Bartholomew, Brett Day Windham, Renilde De Peuter, Penelope Durston, Mona Electric, Julie Floersch, Maricor/Maricar – and Dell herself. Our pal Max Olijnyk of Note to Self has also contributed. Occasionally commissioned to make a pair of custom jeans, he has “had to deal with some pretty neurotic characters”. So he has created a pair of jeans for, without giving it away, the most neurotic character.