North Korea has a problem with Alan Titchmarsh’s crotch. Last week a 2010 episode of Garden Secrets was aired on state television, but the network blurred Titchmarsh from the waist down. The offence was his gardening trousers – a pair of jeans. For the Workers’ Party of Korea, jeans represent an ‘invasion of capitalistic lifestyles’. They must be resisted.

In a sense, Kim Jong-un is right that jeans are a sign of American dominance. In 1986 the philosopher Régis Debray declared there was ‘more power in blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll than the entire Red Army’. Communist states agreed. Western-produced jeans were banned in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The smuggling of bootleg jeans became so widespread that Soviet authorities gave it its own name – ‘jeans crime’. A single pair could be sold for as much as a month’s average salary. In the mid-1970s there were attempts in East Germany to manufacture state-approved alternatives to American jeans, but without much success. As one disgruntled reader wrote to Pravda: ‘When you can make jeans better than Levi’s, that will be the time to start talking about national pride.’

Yet when it comes to the idolisation of jeans, nothing can top country music. The association of jeans with blue-collar work and cowboy individualism is irresistible to many country stars, as spoofed by the comedian Bo Burnham in ‘Country Song (Pandering)’: ‘A cold night/ A cold beer/ A cold jeans.’ The strongest example of sincere jeans worship comes from Zac Brown in his 2003 song ‘Chicken Fried’. He cites ‘a pair of jeans that fit just right’ as one of the things that American troops fight and die to protect.

Giorgio Armani said that jeans represent democracy in fashion because anyone can wear them, but is that true? Jeans have been part of the uniform for every western youth culture movement of modern times (skinheads and hippies; rappers and punks; goths and hipsters), but there’s an unsettling feeling when you see someone in their off-duty jeans, like bumping into your teacher at
the weekend.

In 2018, ‘researchers’ from CollectPlus made the unverifiable claim that 53 was the maximum age someone could get away with jeans. The truth is that while age, attractiveness and politics may all be factors, who can and can’t wear them is an instinctual judgment. Ronald Regan could wear jeans; Richard Nixon couldn’t.

Confession: I don’t own a pair of jeans. I once told this to a Montanan cowboy. He looked at me as if I’d told him I don’t own a toothbrush. Unlike Kim, my dislike isn’t ideological, it’s visceral. Jeans may be timeless, but their different iterations are not. I blame my prejudice on the style that was popular when I was teenager in the early 2000s. Then, the fashion for boys’ jeans was big, baggy and deliberately ripped, worn so they hung around the thighs. I was inoculated against them forever, like a bad oyster.

Still, while I don’t own a pair, and I’ll keep to corduroys and chinos, I’m grateful jeans exist, because they led to some nifty innovations. For instance, jeans were the first trouser to feature an ‘Amazing Hookless Fastener’ – or, as it was later renamed, a zip.