Denim Blues

A fanny shortage

Blue denim wove its way through the social revolutions of the '60s and '70s, clothing everyone from Yippies to Sun Day activists and pushing worldwide production last year to a record 750 million yds. Alas, that was more denim than there were fannies to fill it. Result: a glut of material and sharp cutbacks at the plants that make it, even though sales of jeans, jackets and other finished items have remained high. Wall Street analysts figure that U.S. production will drop this year to about 500 million yds.

Cone Mills of Greensboro, N.C., the world's largest producer, now runs its denim looms only four days a week instead of six. J.P. Stevens shut down half the 565 looms at its denim-making factory in Rock Hill, S.C. Foreign manufacturers are in much worse shape; they jumped heavily into denim a few years back when sales of the U.S.-made original began to soar. Hong Kong turns out a fifth of the denim it once did, Mexico is down to one mill, and Venezuela is out of the business altogether.

U.S. textile men believe that the great denim shakeout has now "bottomed out" and that better days are ahead. But the market is no longer growing by 17% to 18% a year, as it was in the mid-1970s, and has slowed to a 2% to 3% pace. Levi Strauss, the biggest U.S. blue jeans maker, showed a sales drop in its Jeans-wear Division in the second quarter, to $138 million from $173 million last year.

Yet the U.S.'s love affair with the stuff clearly throbs on. "Black denim" jeans, the dark, stiff kind that James Dean wore, are big sellers right now, as are the sexy, $32-and-up numbers put out by big-name designers. The blue-textile phenomenon may well have passed its sales prime, says Norman Karr, executive director of the Men's Fashion Association, "but there are many good years left." .

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