Megan Fox is steadily beefing up her modeling portfolio.  The actress/model is not only the face of Armani underwear, she is now the face of Armani Jeans.  Her new black-and-white ad campaign for Fall 2010 is more girl next door with only a hint of sexy.  Lately celebrities have been fronting ad campaigns for major fashion brands in even greater numbers.  They come with the great looks and a built in following.  Armani is calculating that ladies all over the world will want to look like Megan, and thus purchase the jeans she endorses.  They would be right, who doesn’t want to look like a fox?  Pun intended.  Before you go feeling sorry for the models, they are turning to acting with great success.  It’s simply a case of the two professions playing in each other’s arena with impressive results.

Rock & Republic has fallen victim to an economy that has lost its appetite for $300 jeans.  The high-end designer denim company filed for Chapter 11 bankrupcy protection yesterday.  Back in November of 2009 we wrote a post titled Do These Skinny Jeans Make My Credit Card Bill Fat?  We now have an answer to the question posed, and it is a resounding yes.  The post referred to the high price of denim jeans, and evidence was already mounting that lower-priced denim were favored by consumers.   Even the most fashionable and trendy men and women are now cautious about their spending when comes to jeans.  The post came from a New York Times article Preshrunk Prices which dealt with the pricing resistance denim designers and retailers were facing from consumers.  Rock & Republic is sold in high-end retail stores like Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.

Rock & Republic files Chapter 11 bankruptcy  [Reuters]

Preshrunk Prices  [NYT Style]

Related Post: Do These Skinny Jeans Make My Credit Card Bill Fat?

Victoria Beckham is relaunching her denim collection with a sleeker new look.  She’s not only changing the look of her jeans, but the name as well.  Her jeans label once known as dVb, has been renamed Victoria Beckham Denim.  The jeans start at $235 a pair.  You will have your choice of leggings and boyfriend jeans, as well as cutoff shorts and denim jackets.  The new collection will be available just in time for spring 2010.

Victoria Beckham’s New Jeans  [Elle UK]

Denim jeans have a history rooted back to the days of gold mining when they were made almost exclusively for hard labor.  Flash forward over a hundred years and the cotton denim of yore has been morphed into high priced designer duds. 

Jeans now come in straight, skinny, boyfriend and even jeggings and, as of about two years ago, they would have cost you between $300 to $1,000.  Why you might ask?  Well apparently many have been asking themselves that very question because they stopped investing in those high priced jeans. 

The recession has adversely affected the designer jeans market, and the once sky-rocketing prices are now returning to earth.  “Charging $600 for jeans for no reason at all — those days are over,” said You Nguyen, the senior vice president of women’s merchandising and design for Levi Strauss & Company.  Levi Strauss is no stranger to the denim market being the originator of  blue denim jeans here in America. 

Consumers have a range of choices from Gap jeans at about $60 to a variety of designer denim now at an average of about $200.  It’s the old story of supply and demand, once the demand fell, so did the prices.  The designers rode a wonderful wave for a while, but all good things must come to an end.

Now companies are looking for ways to re-interpret and transform blue jeans, and to make them desirable once again.  I’m sure they will succeed in their efforts, but will they ever return to the free for all pricing of the past decade?  That still remains to be seen.

Preshrunk Jeans [NYT/Style]