In the 1970s, jeans weren’t considered presidential. Former President Gerald R. Ford, a square-jawed Republican, wore stocky suits, and while it’s possible that Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy wore denim in the Oval Office, there is no record of them in Levi’s as they held the nation’s highest office.
Then came President Jimmy Carter.
“Jeans are an authentic part of Carter’s character,” The New York Times wrote of Mr. Carter’s clothes in 1976, just as he was about to be elected president, completing the unlikely journey from his roots as a Georgia peanut farmer. Jeans never stopped being part of Mr. Carter’s character. Up to the end of his life, work shirts and bluejeans were staples of Mr. Carter’s uniform, especially as he spent some of his post-presidency building homes with Habitat for Humanity.
Mr. Carter, the 39th president of the United States who died on Sunday, would prove to be an Oval Office trendsetter. Nearly all the presidents who followed him were captured wearing jeans while in office. Ronald Reagan, who walloped Mr. Carter at the polls, sealing the peanut farmer’s fate as a one-term president, was a double-denim fashion plate. Later, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all wore washed denim in office (although Mr. Obama was plagued by accusations that his looked more akin to “dad jeans”).
Mr. Carter could be credited with shepherding jeans to the political stage as a uniform — or, possibly, a costume — of all-American, hardworking humility. There is a direct throughline from Mr. Carter’s bluejeaned modesty to politicians like Marco Rubio and Pete Buttigieg stumping in jeans as a signal that they’re different than those cloistered suits in Washington.
But unlike many of the politicians that followed, Mr. Carter was genuine in his down-home image. A child of the Bible Belt, he was raised in a house without running water or electricity. One of Mr. Carter’s early chores was milking cows, an activity calling for something as durable as denim.
