Tummy Tuck Jeans and the History of Jeans

Hello and welcome to the blog for real women, who don't look like they could fit comfortably down the back of a wall mounted raditor anytime soon - and welcome to our lowdown on Tummy Tuck Jeans. Tummy tuck jeans are a new innovation in jeans by the Not Your Daughters Jeans fashion company. Quite simply, the jeans are made for women who are not catwalk models - if you do not have a ironing board flat tummy and a behind like two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief, these could well be of serious interest to you. I'm going to go into the history of jeans, why there was a gap in the market for women who didn't look like the average French fry and where those tummy tuck jeans fit into the picture. Hopefully this will help explain what all the fuss is about with the jeans that claim to make you drop a whole dress size...


OK, first the really old history. The word jeans technically means trousers made exclusively from denim and it’s a corruption of the French phrase, bleu de Genes, meaning the blue colour of the town of Genes. Denim began in Europe in Nimes, denim being a corruption of the phrase "de Nimes" (from Nimes) and in Chieri, Italy, where they were later exported for sale through the French port of Genoa. The earliest jeans were worn by sailors who needed trousers you could literally drag through hell and back but still stay sturdy! Around the same period, sailors in Dhurka, India began wearing overalls in denim, which through the ages became known as - guess what- dungarees. From early roots as hard-working wear for sailors, the man who revolutionised jeans just has to be the famous Levi Strauss.

Straus was a European, from Germany, trading in goods with mining towns in California in the early 1800s. Straus helped cement American's love affair with jeans by inventing the patented rivet. Up until the end of World War II, it’s fair to say jeans were mostly seen as a sturdy work wear item, rather like say boiler suits, worn in factories and the like.



James Dean, Marlon Brando and the stars of the 1950s new cinema wave changed all that, repositioning jeans as the trendy must have item for the newly emerging identity of modern youth. Sometimes banned from smarter places, jeans moved more mainstream in the 1960s, when women’s jeans zippers moved from the right side to the front, like the guys. Jeans occupied a steady market among the bright young things of the era until the point in the 1970s where they entered general fashion.

Women who remember the 1960s will tell you stories of lying on the bed, gasping for air as they struggled to do the zip up. Once you were in, you were in but it was heavy going on the way. Earlier denim was not as forgiving as the later stretch varieties. Jump fowards to the 80s and women will tell you there were often two types on sale, with the stretch variety marketed as "Stretch for Comfort" and the like and then regular denim, the stuff you couldn't breathe too well in after a nice meal. Stretch denim was a Godsend for those women who just weren’t shaped like runway stick thin models. In the 60s and 70s the waists were high, through the 80s, 90s and naughties, generally they creeped lower and lower to the point of low riders and hipsters.



The only trouble with this brave new pelvic-bowl skimming look dreamed up by the fashion elite was, no amount of stretch denim or new fangled lycra was going control what happened at the top of the waistband - and the muffin top reared its fleshy head.


Yup, the flesh would just pop out of the top and phrases to describe it entered the popular vernacular. Muffin-top, whales tail, mom paunch, mom pudge, jelly belly - whatever, women started to find that rather than give the sex appeal of the uber-thin models in the oh so slick adverts, their jeans gave them a strange cut-in-half-look. Bottom half = slim. Top-half = absolutely bizarre sausagey-type rolls at the top of the jeans. Another problem was underwear peeping out the back of the jeans if you bent over. Funnily enough, many women over the age of 19 weren't always super-keen on showing others their underwear, say at a school sports day, or perhaps wandering through the markethall at Ikea. With flesh bursting out of the top and knickers festooning the back view, the time was right for a product for non-stick-insect women of dignified years.



Not Your Daughters Jeans were created to fill the gap, addressing both the tummy topper and panty-flashing problems. They feature a panel with criss-cross stitching at both the waist and seat of the jeans. If you can't find out too much about the panels, it’s probably because they're patented - literally, no-one had come up with the idea before then. The effect was to hold in the tummy under a high waisted front, avoiding spilling flesh, and prevent the bottom from simply heading south, giving a perkier shape al round. Unlike corsets and much of the depressing shape wear around, the jeans aimed to not actually hurt the wearer- no digging in, no breathless feeling, no restriction of movement. The brand seem to have got it right as their baby mushroomed from a small product to a absolute best seller in the states and is steadily gaining converts across the globe. They also claim to make you drop a dress size.

The marketing is perfect for women sick to the back teeth of jeans that they spill out of or make them feel downright uncomfortable every moment they're on. Telling you can also drop a dress size can give you a lift if you're feeling a little 'old-ladyish' - the tide IS turning and women are becoming seen as sexy and interesting beyond – shock, horror - the late 20s, despite the downright bizarre Hollywood obsession with staying younger looking. Tummy tuck jeans simply came along at the right time, with the waistbands heading lower, there had to be a consumer backlash for women who don't want to look plain pudgy in just any old pair of denims. If you haven't checked them out yet, you might want to investigate what other people are saying, try a pair at a store and see for yourself - these are not those teen styled jeans that simply make you look like you’re having an attempt at recapturing your youth by masquerading as some type of thong-flaunting chipolata in motion.

To find out more, check back to this blog and check out my team's thoughts on slimming jeans