Paintings by the “Master of the Blue Jeans” show men and women wearing denim skirts and jeans in 1655.
Jeans are believed to have originated either in Nimes in France - de Nimes gives us the word denim - or in Genoa, in north-western Italy, with the city's name in French - Gênes - eventually morphing into the English jeans.
The history was based on fragmented written records that documented the shipments of the low-cost fabric that flooded from Genoa into northern Europe in the mid-17th century
Newly-discovered works, apparently painted near Venice around 1655, suggest that jeans have Italian, rather than French, ancestry.
In one picture, a peasant woman, wearing a skirt that appears to be made of denim, mends a piece of clothing. In another, a teenage girl wearing a torn blue skirt made out of rough fabric, begs for money. The third depicts a young boy wearing a torn jacket made from a dark blue cloth. The rips in the jacket, and in the peasant woman's skirt, reveal that the fabric is indigo but threaded with white - just like modern jeans.
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