DIAMOND IS a boy’s best friend, particularly when he croons, "I’d like to say we’ll do okay forever in blue jeans." The Jazz Singer knew well that the material whose origins can be traced back to Genoa, Italy — a word whose evolution went genose, geane, gene, jean, for you etymologists — could provide a comfort greater than its context. More than the garb of Casual Fridays and weekend loafing, jeans are threaded through our fashion peaks and faux pas so consistently that they reveal the seams of that fabrication we call a self. When we remove our heads from our bell-bottoms, we realize that jeans explain our character no less than our, well, genes.

A fashion-unconscious child of the ’70s, I’ve only a dim recollection of my older cousins running around in painted or embroidered jeans with a hot-pink comb protruding from a back pocket. What Levi Strauss & Co. historian Lynn Downey calls the "decorated-denim craze" meant nothing to me. No, like those pick-toting Gold Rush miners of the 1850s who put denim squarely on the American map, I looked to jeans for nothing more than utility. The name said it all: Tough Skins.

One — actually, one’s mother — would purchase these jeans at Sears back when the department store had balls. There they hung — the jeans, that is — in the afterthought that was the boys-clothing section sandwiched between the displays of power tools and heavy lawn equipment. They were both a steal and of steel. Rust seemed the sole threat to Tough Skins. Rips, tears? Maybe with a mishandled Craftsman chain saw. Sure, the knees eventually wore to a scratch-ticket silver, but only to reveal some indestructible, otherworldly layer that withstood an intrepid stunt-kid's every move.

The makers of Tough Skins appreciated how readily young boys turn an open 90 feet into a chance to slide into home plate. Stretches of pavement or grass, linoleum hallways, dirt paths — all supported the hard hook-slide needed to elude or impale the imaginary opposing catcher. "If you can live with the bruises, breaks, and sprains," the good people of Sears seemed to say, "we’ll keep your flesh free from raspberries, cuts, or glistening abrasions." Not a bad deal.

Eventually, though, the need to walk upright returned, and those carefree, reckless days of Tough Skins gave way to the thin skin of middle-school self-consciousness. One day, we abandoned the little-man wardrobe placed neatly on the bed by mom, and, egad, began to make sartorial choices. I recall three brands of jeans competing for our allowances in those days, the gold stitching on their ass pockets as memorable as their names. Levi’s, my favorite, featured the V-shaped bird with which I had inexpertly filled the skies of grade-school pictures; Lee sported the sine waves I would later diagram in Mr. Schiess’s science class; and Wrangler had that crude "W" in which I once saw a pair of pointy knockers.

A certain parity among the brands prevented us from drawing conclusions about one another based on our jeans; instead we pored over the Rosetta stones of musical taste and sneaker choice. As though preferring "Rock the Casbah"–era Clash to A Flock of Seagulls and Chuck Taylors to shell-toed Adidas revealed anything. At times, though, the fit of one’s jeans unzipped a bit of one’s character. Skin-tight jeans flirted with sexual precocity, while crossing out the waist size on a Levi's tag with Magic Marker hinted at eating disorders.

But that was before jeans assumed personalities of their own. None of us could have foreseen the denim revolution toward which we were inexorably heading: the designer jeans of the ’80s. Jordache, Sassoon, Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, Sergio Valente. Guess — guess which brand I didn’t own. Those were flings, though, meaningless one-pair stands (straight-legged, never bell-bottomed) with some flashy players. Alas, my ’80s heart, which pumped to the beat of U2 and the Smiths, New Order and Lloyd Cole, belonged to the denim concoctions of Marithé and François Girbaud.

In what now seems like a stroke of marketing genius, those clever Girbauds audaciously placed their tag mid crotch. Other designers left their signatures on your ass, where it could be read, reread, and played Scrabble with by cowardly voyeurs, but Girbaud dared the curious onlooker to stand before the jean-clad and survey the wares. Talk about front and center. Focusing attention on the crotch of a high-school student was, of course, redundant. Like Sears, Girbaud spoke to our monomaniacal imaginations; we moved from baseball to balls and new images of rounding the bases. It was a seminal moment in my jeans history.

College and the ’90s would offer constant variation on the jeans of the ’80s: acid-washed, stone-washed, ripped, patched, and ripped again. Most emblematic of that time, though, was the quest to determine the Volvo-caliber mileage you could put on a pair before having to wash them. There was no stain or stench that a cursory rubbing, airing, or shaking out couldn’t undo. A dearth of shirts or socks or underwear quickly became apparent; two pairs of jeans, though, could carry one for a semester, maybe a year.

But perhaps denim will suffer the same fate as vinyl at the hands of a generation that seems to prefer beige to blue. In 1999, sales of Levi’s dropped to $5.1 billion from $7.1 billion in 1996. To right the 28 percent dip, the company targeted its most expensive ad campaign ever at twentysomethings. The theme? "Make them your own." You may recall the narcissistic languor with which the jean-clad posed before mirrors in these spots.

I get the appeal — and paradox — of mass-marketing individuality. Still, I'd rather stand in line with John Wayne and James Dean than Calvin Klein. And as I write these words in an oft-laundered, plain-crotch pair of Levi’s 501s, I'd like to think that this recent purchase owes more to personal nostalgia than Madison Avenue, more to my Tough Skins self than my crotch-centered years.

Ron Fletcher can be reached at ronfletcher@bchigh.edu