The future "widespread museum" dedicated to Jeans, unique at national level, is not a real museum with a specific location, but will involve the city in various ways. The project starts from the annual event of the Municipality of Genoa GenovaJeans, scheduled in its first edition from 2 to 6 September 2021.
It will mark the birth of the "Via del Jeans", a tourist, commercial and cultural itinerary aimed at enhancing some streets in the old town centre – Via Pré, Via del Campo and Via San Luca – where this fabric has been produced and used since ancient times. With exhibitions, temporary shops, fashion shows, shows, conferences and events organized together with the producers of this cult clothing for all generations, GenovaJeans will become the Italian event specialized in sustainable innovation in the sector, involving consumers in a path of quality and respect for the environment that increasingly characterizes jeans made in Italy.
Thanks to this concept, the jeans "museum" will actually be a path to the rediscovery of many realities linked to this material, from the magnificent Passion Cloths preserved at the Diocesan Museum to the 24 works of contemporary Italian artists donated in 2020 to the Civic Collections and exhibited at the Blue Autumn exhibition at Villa Croce. iuseppe Garibaldi, leading the Expedition of the Thousand, wore jeans. Even with a patch. We are in 1860 and Italy is about to be united. Departing from the Quarto rock in Genoa, the patriot wears a pair of blue moleskin trousers, now in the Central Museum of the Risorgimento in Rome. The thread that links the stages in the history of the most widely used garment in the world starts from the Ligurian capital: jean is in fact a type of rough and resistant cloth of Genoese origin. Already used before Garibaldi by those who worked in the port, it arrived overseas and from America bounced back to Europe over the centuries. Until it became the clothing symbol of equality between the sexes, of youth protests, of freedom, of rock, punk and rap. But not without controversy, judgments and prohibitions. So much so that the dress code of some airlines until a few years ago forbade it in the first classes.
