'Master of blue jeans' holds key to fashion riddle

Basic Information

September 19 2010: A new exhibit of recently uncovered oil paintings by an unknown artist from 17th Century Italy shows that blue jeans were not invented in the United States after all, and must date back to at least 1655 in Europe. This unknown artist (known only as "The Master of Blue Jeans") painted very realistic images of the working class and peasantry, with blue jeans in nearly every image.

Sources

Bibliography

1. original article

Game and Story Use

• Clearly time travel is involved.
  • Could merely be justification for your PCs modern clothing not standing out in the past. "I changed my jumper."
  • It may be evidence of a connecticut yankee, either the painter or the person selling blue jeans at least a hundred years ahead of the conventional history. How'd they get there, and do they need to be rescued?
    • Realistically, cotton serge and indigo dye have been around for a long time (and woollen serge even longer) … Jacob Davis just picked a cheap hard wearing fabric off the shelf when he invented his prototype overalls so there's no reason that peasants back in the old world couldn't have been using something very similar a couple of centuries earlier. Arguably Davis' real innovation was riveting the seam-joints.
  • Or maybe this is some evidence of a parallel timeline, parallel universe, or reality quake. Someone has changed the past (or opened a portal to the past) and eventually the delayed ripple effect will transform the world, moving the industrial revolution to an earlier era. If the players don't intervene, eventually even the cavemen will be wearing blue jeans! That's bad, right?
• More prosaically, this could be the old trope of a forgery right in every detail but one glaring one.
  • It's a forgery … from the future where a lazy researcher hasn't accounted for cultural changes over 350 years. Sort of like the Hollywood movies that have late-Norman era Robin Hood in 15th century doublet and hose or 14th century Scots in Iron-Age costume and warpaint.