Did Bob Dylan Invent Bootcut Jeans?

This holiday season, if you find yourself parked in a theater seat to witness Timothée Chalamet embody an early-1960s Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown, keep an eye out for the changing hems of Dylan’s blue jeans.

Indeed, while the new James Mangold-directed film follows a four-year period in Dylan’s career, from his 1961 arrival in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to his “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, it also traces the musician’s shifting self-presentation—most notably through his changing hairstyles, but also his denim. When Dylan lands in New York City with little more than a snap-buttoned cap, an acoustic guitar, and a dream of meeting Woody Guthrie, he wears a farmer-ish pair of late-’50s Levi’s 501s; by the time he plugs in his amp at Newport, he’s rocking a leather jacket and ultra-skinny jeans.

“I realized that the onus would really be on costume and hair to help guide the audience through this visual growth of this 19-year-old kid to a 24-year-old man,” says costume designer Arianne Phillips, who previously earned Oscar nominations for her work on Mangold’s 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, as well as Quintin Tarantino’s 2019 mid-century epic Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood.

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

“I was really looking for threads of continuity in Bob’s character and his taste level,” Phillips says, “and one thing I can say for sure in that excavation was denim. Bob has always worn jeans.”

During pre-production, Phillips connected with Paul O’Neill, the design director of Levi’s Vintage Clothing, the brand’s sublabel that recreates and reimagines archival designs. Back in 2019, O’Neill and his team developed a capsule collection based on the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s called “Folk City,” and he’d already done a good deal of research into the wardrobes of Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Joan Baez (who also features in A Complete Unknown, as portrayed by Monica Barbaro). While reading A Freewheelin’ Time—a memoir by Dylan’s then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, a version of whom appears in the film as Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo—O’Neill uncovered a great sartorial tidbit: In the mid-1960s, Rotolo used to sew inverted-U-shaped panels into the inseams of Dylan’s 501s, widening the hems so that he could more easily wear the pants over boots. In other words, Rotolo was DIY-ing bootcut jeans years before Levi’s started manufacturing them in 1969.

Courtesy of Levi’s

Courtesy of Levi’s

“I can remember me and my colleague high-fiving each other when we found that out,” says O’Neill. “Arianne said they had Dylan experts consulting on the film, and none of them had even heard about this before or seen it.”

Bob Dylan in 1964. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

It was a lucky nugget for the costume team, one that not only explains one of the musician’s style idiosyncrasies but also adds narrative depth to Dylan and Rotolo’s dynamic. (The real-life Rotolo also appeared on the cover of Dylan’s 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; for that photoshoot, Dylan himself wore a pair of 501s.) Once O’Neill and Phillips discovered the detail about Dylan’s custom flares, they started noticing them everywhere—including on the album artwork for his fourth LP, Another Side of Bob Dylan. To commemorate A Complete Unknown and its costumes, Levi’s Vintage Clothing produced a capsule collection featuring a reproduction of Dylan’s customized XX 501s complete with hand-sewn bootcut inserts and a D-ring leather belt, as well as toffee-hued suede work jacket based on a jacket Dylan wore during the era. The full assortment will hit the brand’s website on December 20.

In A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s classic denim also contrasts with Baez’s trendier silhouettes, which often included Levi’s with a white or black logo tab on the back pocket, which the company produced in the early 1960s to denote hipper styles geared towards young people. In this case, that meant more denim storytelling: Dylan, like his customized jeans, was sly and rugged; Baez, fresh and forward-thinking.

But by the mid ’60s, the folk scene—and with it, Dylan’s tastes in music, clothing, and otherwise—was in metamorphosis. And the jeans, they were a-changin’.

Phillips gleaned that after Dylan had toured England in spring 1965, he “clearly had come back with his Cuban-heeled boots, his skinny jeans, his military peacoat, that whole look. He was a big fan of the Beatles, and he met the Beatles and he was hanging out with Donovan [Phillips Leitch],” she says. “It was Carnaby Street mod time, and he definitely brought that look back.”

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

The costume designer consulted with O’Neill to identify the super-skinny jeans that Dylan wore during his historic Newport performance that summer. In 1965—the same year Bob went electric—Levi’s introduced the Super Slims, which O’Neill says “were basically the skinniest jeans you could make without using stretch fabric.” He sourced fabric produced at a defunct mill in North Carolina to recreate a pair for the scene. Though there was no photographic evidence to verify for certain that Dylan wore Super Slims that night at Newport, for the film, they fit the bill.

But Dylan’s trailblazing Newport ’65 performance held another fashion mystery. Per photos from the era, Dylan wore an uncharacteristically loud mint-green, polka-dotted blouse during a soundcheck for his electric set; he later wore the same shirt on the cover of one of his 1966 EPs. When Phillips first showed images of the shirt to Mangold, she recalls, “Jim wasn’t so sold on it.” But Chalamet himself had a vision for how the shirt might make sense in the movie. (Hint: Chalamet’s Dylan wears it in a scene opposite Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash, a character whom Phillips—having costumed Walk the Line—relished the chance to revisit “in a totally different film and with a different actor.”)

Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

“Timmy loved that shirt and I loved the shirt, too,” says Phillips. “It really seeds what we know Bob goes on to in ’65, where his style really explodes.”

Over the course of the film, as O’Neill puts it, we see Dylan morph “from this rough-and-ready traveling character into this peacock with the big hair and the shades and the skinny jeans and the polka dot shirt.” Even so, the blue jeans provided a through-line.

“Denim is so beautiful because it’s the signature of a youth culture movement [and] when we think about today, we take it for granted,” says Phillips. “I’ve done a lot of mid-century films, but denim, there are so many dress codes [where] you couldn’t wear denim in the workplace, you couldn’t wear it to school, you couldn’t wear it to church. It was really relegated to the blue-collar workers [or] how we dressed on the weekends until it became a signature of the youth movement in the Sixties. And that really, that rebellion—I mean, that was punk rock before punk rock, right?”