Fashion Brief
Double denim. I never thought I’d write this, but I think it’s a thing.
I was in the beer garden of my local pub on Sunday afternoon and there was quite a bit of double denim going on.
One woman was dressed in a pale blue vintage Levi’s denim jacket with a simple white T-shirt over a pair of straight leg denim jeans in the same hue, while a couple of others were wearing darker denim shirts with boyfriend jeans and flat sandals or slides.
They all looked great: cool, confident and chic. But it’s hard to think of an outfit with as much stigma attached to it as double denim.
It was huge in the 90s, but since then the Canadian tuxedo has been pretty much a laughing stock, particularly after a particularly memorable quadruple denim style statement by Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake at the 2001 American Music awards.
Double denim got an outing last year during the normcore movement, but that was with a heavy dose of irony and the kind of styling that would be more at home on teenagers in a Larry Clark film than in the beer garden in an inner-city pub.
But the women I saw doing double denim at the pub the other day were neither particularly young nor being ironic. They were 30-something women who looked relaxed yet stylish in clothes that were both chic and comfortable.
So why not give double denim another chance?
There was a blue mood all over the spring/summer 2015 runways, including some covetable cropped straight leg jeans and denim skirt and denim dresses at Gucci in Milan, smartly tailored indigo jackets at Burberry Prorsum in London and even a ruffled denim top and ballgown skirt at Veronique Branquinho in Paris. Even Levi Strauss has rebooted its classic Levi’s 501 jean with the new 501 CT style featuring a tapered leg and a slightly roomier waist.
With so many designers rediscovering the enduring street smarts of denim, the beauty about this trend is you probably already have it in your wardrobe.
I’m betting most of us own at least one pair of jeans, and most likely there is a chambray shirt or a denim jacket lurking at the back of your wardrobe too. So why not wear them both together for a fresh take on some trusty staples?
I find the best way to wear double denim is in clean washes and classic styles like a straight leg jean with a man-style shirt or cropped denim jacket. There are plenty of great denim top and bottom options at Bassike and Jac + Jack, while General Pants offers a host of more affordable pieces.
Pop a black polo neck under your denim shirt for winter, swing a classic brown leather bag over your shoulder and you’re good to go with a double denim look for autumn.
