What does the recession mean for designer jeans? As voters and dressers, California is the nation's fussiest "blue" state, but how do we reconcile the sudden need for durability with our historic addiction to style? This is a dilemma that mirrors the problem besetting the Obama household as it searches for the First Puppy. (It must be hypoallergenic and, preferably, from a shelter.) In LA, jeans have to cradle our haunches like Waterford fruit bowls, and, thanks to the economic downturn, we'd better start zipping into double-stitched denim that can take the slide with us without losing one decorative pocket.

I love T-shirts. And these days, rather than serving merely as a method to hide my back hair from the "civilized" world, they can also be worn as a fashion statement -- or, worse yet, a geopolitical commentary. Furia, a Latin American communications firm, teamed with Levi's to create a line of five limited-edition T-shirts with some nifty designs that stand for something, you know, important. Their prints of a barb-wired bear or a screwed-up storm cloud aren't simply the product of some Pratt grad who got lucky. According to the press release, these designs "reflect over industrialization and the development in large cities." These are the first in a line of future hookups between Levi's and other design firms. Click to see more, including a bird with Eiffel Towers as feet!

Brit artist and professional provocateur Damien Hirst has teamed up with Levi’s for the second time. And the fruits of the collaboration -- “three works of art of spin-painted 501 styles and the development of a limited edition collection,” says WWD -- are nothing to scoff at. The collection in question features 12 denim styles, all ornamented with classic Hirst motifs (think “skulls, colorful spots and tropical butterflies,” adds WWD).

The shark was the showboat in Jaws, until it sank. But the circa 1975 clothes that Captain Quint, Matt Hooper, and Chief Brody wore aboard the Orca live on as rugged essentials for any real man.

The Academy Awards went to best Sound, Film Editing, and Original Score for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, but to our line of thinking, best Costume Design should also have taken an Oscar. Yet awards presentations aren’t known for rewarding subtlety, and so, in a year heavy with period film nominations—The Four Musketeers, The Man Who Would Be King, and Barry Lyndon, the latter, which won the 1975 Oscar—it’s no surprise that the effortless Martha’s Vineyard-by-way-of-Manhattan style of Jaws’s lead characters went unnoticed.

Sexy denims are always a classic, even when the times they are a changin'.

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Photography by Diego Fuga
Styling by Elizabeth Sulcer