Denim is the perfect material to be at once casual and neat, both outdoors and inside.

Over the years, denim has expanded its audiences and it will continue to do so.

The last of the boomers will take refuge and separate themselves from their cherished freedom garment, just as the new Great Generation is just starting to think jean. Denim becomes an intergenerational business.

As if to cure the malaise of the denim industries, that had to fight against the lightweight athleisure and loungewear taking over from the heavier woven material, denim now enters the clinic of creativity, healing from the past and rethinking what it will become in the future.

And the future of jeans is promising in its simplicity, guaranteed by a changing set of lifestyles and behaviour patterns.

I imagine the image of a jean which is healing under caring bandages, convalescing after enduring neglect that disrupted its fibres, discoloured its dyestuff and ravaged its cloth, achieving the often-dramatic effect of tattered poverty.

For two decades, these mutilations became the norm and even today, knuckled knees can be seen peeping out of the slimmest of ripped old-fashioned trousers…

But with society rebuilding new and exciting scenarios, with a great migration to the countryside and the great resignation from work, we are set free to roam and need a pulled together hybrid between the rural and the urban. Here, denim is the perfect material to be at once casual and neat, both outdoors and inside.

Thus, the qualities of cloth are stricter and calendared, the colours darker and lighter, abandoning the middle ground. Clothes are cleaned up, with the shirt jacket to replace the jacket, the collar to replace the hood, the button to replace the zip.

At times, these items are even elegant, cut as if they are couture. First time customers include senior citizens and junior newcomers, both often experiencing denim for the first time around. Restoration is the new name of the game; tailoring, finishing and fringing as well as mending, patching and stitching to repair the damage of lore.

The spick and span attitude to denim will require a complete overhaul of ad campaigns and influencers, away from the rough and rustic and towards the refined and almost romantic.