Double denim describes an outfit in which someone wears denim on top and denim on the bottom at the same time, typically a denim jacket or shirt paired with denim jeans. It is used both as a plain description of what someone has on and as fashion shorthand, sometimes offered as a style tip and sometimes as a gentle tease at wearing too much of the same fabric at once. The look is now often treated as a deliberate style choice rather than a fashion mistake, and the term covers any matching combination of denim pieces, from tailored jackets and jeans to more casual pairings.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘double denim’?
No dated first record of “double denim” as a phrase has been traced. What survives instead is the history of the nicknames that grew up around the same look, chiefly “Canadian tuxedo” and “Texan tuxedo”, both of which are used as synonyms for the double denim style.
The Canadian tuxedo name is commonly linked to an account from Levi’s Vintage Clothing, which tells of the singer Bing Crosby being refused entry to a hotel in Canada in 1951 because he and his companion were dressed head to toe in denim.
Even that story leaves questions open. The nickname may have been in use well before it was widely popularised by the 2001 film Super Troopers, so it is hard to be precise about when it caught on generally, let alone when British writers settled on the plainer term “double denim” for the same look. The outfit itself, and its nicknames, appear to be older than any firmly dated printed record of them, and “double denim” is simply the descriptive British label that came to sit alongside the more colourful American and Canadian names for the same combination of clothes.