G-Star RAW

These jeans are at the intersection of luxury and workwear. The Dutch designer jean company G-Star RAW was founded on the concept of raw denim, producing high-status garments sewn from unwashed denim fabric.

In the 1800s, American slave owners clothed enslaved people using inexpensive fabrics such as raw denim. Densely woven, durable, and easily mended, this cloth was often indigo-dyed by enslaved people who brought with them from Africa generations of knowledge about growing this plant and making it into dye. Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam and English colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, had previously tried growing indigo, but Southern enslaved people were the first to do it successfully in what is now the US.

Until the 1930s, denim was worn in the US by laborers of all ages and races. Jeans later become global fashion garments, most recently through the explosion of the designer jean market in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.