Dad’s Denim: A Life Lived in Levi’s

Levi’s is almost certainly the first clothing brand that ever impressed itself upon my brain as a child. My father was a denim obsessive — a fanatic about clothes in general. His collection of suits, sport coats, ties, shoes, and just about every other kind of clothing (apart from knitwear, which he inexplicably shunned) so quickly exhausted every inch of space in his own closet that it gradually spread into every other bedroom in the house, including my own, before finally taking up an annexed residence in my grandmother’s place down the road and eventually even one or two friends’ homes around town. It was clearly an untenable situation, but there was no curbing it. Clothing was one of his great passions, and within that a deep-seated love of denim reigned supreme. 

My dad loved everything from obscure denim brands down to cheap high street fare all the way through to the Big Three: Lee, Wrangler, and — the brand who reigned supreme in his estimation — Levi’s. Even as a small child (making me a captive audience, I suppose), I remember him meticulously explaining the differences in Levi’s numeric fits, enthusiastically weighing the relative merits of Wrangler vs Lee, and bragging about the fact that he still owned jeans he had worn twenty-some years prior in his university days. At its peak his denim collection, much of which had been worn and mended well beyond the point most people would consider reasonable, comprised many dozens of pieces. But there is no question that he considered his selection of Levi’s 501s — which spanned a range of rinses, colours, sizes, and ages — to be the jewel in his jean crown (the singular ‘jean’ being a common misnomer in South Africa where I’m from, a bit like how fashion-y types use the word ‘pant’ instead of the more common plural form). 

All of this meant, as I mentioned before, that Levi’s was probably the first clothing label I became aware of qua label, and 501s became the first branded product I ever identified as such, long before I knew about All Stars, Jordans, calculator watches, or any of the other obsessions of my youth. 

The problem, however, at least as far as my Levi’s obsessed father was concerned, was that I refused to wear them. For whatever reason, I proved an unusually strong-willed child and staunchly refused to wear jeans until I hit puberty — a preference for shorts and tracksuit bottoms rendering denim a non-negotiable no-go. My dad, despite his desperate entreaties and countless denim-based gifts designed to entice, proved unable to sway me and was left despairing at this young son’s poor taste.

That was until I hit adolescence when suddenly — and, as I would then have argued, independently — I arrived at my own taste for jeans. As I got into films and music and started imitating my heroes on stage and screen, I gave into my dad’s offer to buy me a pair of 501s to break in and make my own. Naturally, my dad was delighted and never wasted an opportunity to compliment me on my denim-friendly frame and bought me a new pair of jeans whenever he could (I had gone off to boarding school by this point, much to his dismay, and so he seized any chance to connect via a new pair of Levi’s or similar). To my adolescent dismay, he would inevitably buy himself a set too so that he could wear his equivalent pair on the same day so that we were dressed to match. After many years of being overweight, he was all too eager to wear a similar size and style to his adolescent son — a habit I naturally found mortifying.  

A motley array of my dad’s jeans I photographed with my phone the last time I went back home

In retrospect, my dad’s weight loss reads more as an omen or a sinister regression. Having unexpectedly attained the same waist size as me in adolescence after being much larger for much of my childhood, he died unexpectedly as I entered adulthood just a few days after my eighteenth birthday. It proved a fairly on-the-nose entrée into adulthood and one coloured in retrospect by a great deal of regret, not least in the realm of clothing. As his clothing obsession finally became my own, he was no longer there to share in it, just as he was no longer there as a person for me to get to know and appreciate fully without the egotistical blinkers of childhood and adolescence. 

It is a sense of loss that’s compounded by the fact that precious little of his once-massive loathing collection survives. Much of it was already gone by the time I got home for the funeral. My mom, understandably burdened by years of what she experienced as an oppressive hoarding tendency coupled with the unexpected need to care for a family on a single income, sold or gave most of it away to friends and family. By the time I regained my bearings, most of it had gone and all I was left with were one or two motley bits and pieces and the few remnants of his denim collection. In a way, the unexpected loss of my father’s wardrobe has become for me a metonym for his death and has made what remains all the more precious to me, his jeans above all else. 

Even as the material remnants of my father’s wardrobe have mostly slipped through my fingers, what I’ve certainly inherited instead is his love of clothes and of denim in particular. It’s from him that I’ve learned to think about longevity, about getting my money’s worth, and about wearing a garment until it’s ragged and then fixing it only to wear it ragged again. In the interest of balance, I’ve also gotten some of the bad stuff: a tendency to buy more than I need and concurrent reluctance to get rid of anything I don’t.

More than this, though, it’s via my father’s passionate interest in clothing — one he was willing to share with anyone willing to listen — that I learned to care about the history and meaning of clothing and, were it not for that, I would never have started this site. Nor would I have listed ‘Levi’s 501s’ as the very first thing to write about when drafting possible topics in the germinating days of Habilitate some three years ago. It’s taken me all that time and the prompting of Levi’s 150th anniversary to get there, but it’s all been there right from the start.

Having just started my own denim-centric clothing obsession shortly before he passed, I wish that my dad was still around to share in the experience. I would have loved to flip the script and buy him a pair of jeans for once, particularly the kind of stuff he could never have dreamt of sourcing back in South Africa. God only knows what he would have made of today’s dizzying array of Japanese selvedge, the ample small batch UK-based options, and, above all else, the cornucopian delights of Levi’s Vintage Clothing and their year-specific 501 offerings. Mostly though, I wish I could hear all of the stories he had to tell about every pair of jeans he owned and listen once more to the countless precious details I’ve forgotten over the years or failed to pay attention to in the first place. 

My father was the first person who made me understand that clothing is about so much more than the necessary coverings we put on our bodies. They are at their core the stories we tell ourselves, our friends, our companions, and our children. They colour our lives and, like the variegated, fraying miles accrued in a beloved pair of jeans, they are the visible markers of a life lived. My dad’s Levi’s live on and, though they are no substitute for the person they represent, they offer some sense of connection that goes to the core of why we get dressed at all. Clothing can connect us to who we are and where we came from and, even after we’re gone, they are tangible, visceral, vestiary reminders of who we are. 

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