A friend in her early 30s recounts to me how when she was small her family never bought ready-to-wear. Instead, like many people in India did and still do, they had clothes stitched by a trusted local tailor. We even had jeans stitched, she remembers with laughter. “You could buy the denim fabric from the mills in Bombay (pre Mumbai) and then the tailor would ask you if you wanted a label attached; you could choose from a stack of labels, copied from international brands.”

Denim’s early associations with the hard rugged masculinity of 18th century pioneering gold prospectors in America translated into the sartorial grammar of youth rebelling against conventional social mores of post war 1950s US and Europe. This soon flowed as a language of modernity into India, with Bollywood heroes from the 1970s onwards portraying characters who flouted conventional values and wore jeans as a symbol of their forward looking modernity.

While domestic jeans brands were available in India from the 1970s, it was foreign brands that were coveted, associated as they were with foreign travel, which at that time was one of the few, and very expensive ways to obtain a pair.

These days, almost 20 years after the first wave of economic reforms began — creating a more open policy environment for international trade — denim by global brands has become almost ubiquitous in urban India. Across metros, jeans paired with t-shirts or kurtas, form the daily wear of many young men and women. These are the children of Manmohanian economics, and jeans are their chosen uniform.

Global brand labels are important with fashion conscious youth, and popular as casual wear with men across generations. Levis has a huge reach, while Wrangler, Lee, Pepe and Bennetton also have sizeable brand presence in metros. Along Linking Road in Brandra, Mumbai, or South Extension in Delhi, both hot spots for flagship store of premium brands, 20m-high billboards display Bollywood stars that strut, stand astride or lounge across convertible cars in denim jeans. This is the good life, and you can enjoy that too, in your premium branded jeans, they seem to say.

These visual cues to the popularity of jeans are borne out by the predicted growth rates of markets for denim across South Asia. A forecast report by Just Style showed the sales of jeans in China are expected to be worth $864m by 2013, a growth of 36 per cent over the 2009 figure of $634m. The Indian subcontinent, however, will be worth a cool $1b by the same point - up 38 per cent from 2009.

Denim’s potency as a symbol of modernity continues to hold sway, but its associations with a globalising uniformity also make for new reinventions of its form and meaning in India. I remember the surprise of seeing Nida Mahmood’s catwalk show at Wills Fashion Week in 2010, where her trademark funky kitsch saris were draped over skintight jeans.

One of my favourite examples of denim reinvented is by Delhi-based designer Pooja Haldar, a young fashion graduate from NIFT. After graduating, she worked for a renowned Indian designer, and has recently finished a course in pattern-cutting at London’s prestigious Central St Martins School of Fashion. She is often to be seen wearing one of her own creations; and my favourite is a jacket of captivating ingenuity and wit.

It is not only that she has made a choli — the most ubiquitous and traditional of Indian female garments — but she has done so by refashioning a pair of blue jeans. This represents ingenious deconstruction, cutting and refitting with masterly precision. The front part of the jeans is now spliced to form two neat sides of the choli, which come to fasten over the front. The zipper now loops back and over the head and shoulders to hang from the nape of the neck over a deliciously low and scooped out back perfectly replicating the coquettish playfulness of traditional cholis that have a similar low cut.

It is a wonderfully flip gesture, assertively overlaying the traditional gendered associations of the choli dress form with that of jeans; in the process Haldar’s design brings together the most traditional and the resolutely modern, creating something unique, and truly rebellious.

(The writer is luxury editor at Financial Chronicle. She is an anthropologist with expertise on luxury and sustainability and is currently writing her doctoral thesis on Indian fashion)

phyllidajay@mydigitalfc.com