AS THE HISTORIAN FOR Levi Strauss & Co., Tracey Panek is responsible for the archives of one of the most recognisable garments in modern culture. In practice, her role is closer to that of a cultural custodian. Denim, after all, does not behave like most fabrics. Because it’s not just a fabric. It’s also a symbol of labour, protest, aspiration and identity that equally transcends generations.

That Levi’s deserves its own private historian shouldn’t be surprising. The fabric and the garment trace their origins back to a functional need for durable clothing in the nineteenth century and have since gone on to be included in nearly every corner of fashion and culture.

Tracey Panek

While Panek was recently in Australia, Esquire caught up with her to chat about the vice-like grip that denim has on the culture and how it has managed to mean so much to so many different sectors of society.

Panek says that the history of jeans is grounded in its working-class origin. Levi’s riveted pants were born of necessity, created for miners, cowboys and labourers who required clothing that could endure hard use. For Panek, those roots remain foundational. It was a garment designed first for utility before it ever became an object of style, she explains.

 “Without those workwear roots, I don’t think it would have the appeal that it does,” she says. That original practicality, she argues, is part of what enabled denim to travel far beyond the fields and factories where it was first worn.

Denim’s trajectory across classes and cultures is unusual. Jeans were initially worn for their function and reliability. They became the symbol of rebellion in the 1950s (with a little help from Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One), then signifiers of youth counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, before being absorbed into mainstream and designer fashion. Levi’s jeans, particularly the 501 model first introduced in 1873 and later adopted by a range of subcultures, are a central part of that story. Denim’s ability to be continually reinterpreted has made it “the default global garment,” in Panek’s words, worn in myriad contexts, from manual labour to music stages and fashion runways. 

“Everywhere I go, people are wearing Levi’s or blue jeans in some form,” she says.

Image: Levi’s

This ubiquity is a reflection of denim’s remarkable class mobility. Few garments can shift from workwear to subculture staple, from preppy uniform to luxury fashion mainstay, while retaining its own individual identity. Jeans can signify rugged functionality, adolescent defiance, youthful ease or high-end design – sometimes all at once. 

The same pair of classic jeans that served as durable attire for early twentieth-century labourers now appear on designer runways decades later, a luxury item that fetches more money than those miners might have seen in their lifetime. It is this adaptability that Panek sees as central to denim’s enduring relevance: it allows wearers “to fit in and yet to be your own unique self at the same time.”

To prove her point, Panek directs my attention to a pair of jeans behind her – a washed, faded and worn pair of 501s that carry a lifetime of stories in its creases and patches. These, she says, were once owned by poet and punk musician Patti Smith. This is just one of many archival pieces that she has acquired during her time at Levi’s, including a pair owned by Kurt Cobain, collecting jeans the way some people might collect a Hockney or a Caravaggio.

501 Jeans owned by Patti Smith donated to archives, June 2013
Jeans once owned by Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain.

BEFORE she joined Levi Strauss & Co. in 2014, Panek had trained as a historian and initially worked in technology. Like most of us, Panek spent her life in jeans and in her own words, she grew up wearing 501s. “These were my high school uniform!” she tells Esquire. “I have three sisters and we all wore them. They were the ‘It’ jeans and these ones in particular were a shrink to fit. So it was broad denim and you would buy it, you’d have to wash it several times, but then they fit you like a glove.”

Today her work involves interpreting, preserving and sourcing garments that map denim’s path from nineteenth-century workwear to global staple, connecting individual stories to a broader cultural record

It’s also about tying these historical threads to contemporary fashion. According to Panek, the Levi’s archive is an immersive resource for designers, curators, and collaborators.

“We don’t design in a vacuum,” Panek explains. “We start with Levi’s that go back to the 1800s.” 

Those pieces stored in the library are preserved and studied and help shape new designs and interpretations. Ironically, or perhaps poetically, it also illustrates how little jeans have had to change over the years. A testament to the original design’s pragmatic functionality.

But this in turn informs the current designs, which can be seen as living archives. Blue Tab, a premium line developed through close study of garments, labels and construction techniques held in the company’s archive. The name itself comes from an archival designation used historically to mark elevated or specialised denim products. For the modern Blue Tab line, Levi’s designers worked directly with archival pieces to understand proportion, finishing and fabric choices, using those findings to inform new garments rather than reproductions.

Then there’s the cultural and collaborative element. Denim has become a wearable canvas for many contemporary designers and Levi’s has deepened its engagement with those artisans who understand denim’s cultural weight and material identity. This has included collaborations with Junya Watanabe, the Japanese designer known for deconstruction and technical precision, whose experimental jeans reimagine classic silhouettes. These partnerships, which blend Levi’s heritage with Watanabe’s avant-garde approach, speak to denim’s capacity to bridge craftsmanship and conceptual design.

Similarly, Levi’s ongoing collaboration with NIGO, the Japanese streetwear designer and founder of HUMAN MADE, underscores denim’s resonance in global fashion culture. 

For Panek, the personal histories that come with every pair of jeans are just as meaningful as the aesthetic or even economic journey of the brand. She points again to the wear marks on the pair acquired from Patti Smith as evidence of how jeans become records of daily life. “They’re really a repository of social history,” she says, reflecting on how a garment stitched for durability can also capture human movement, labour and memory.

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