In 1935, Vogue magazine published an editorial endorsing jeans as 'Western chic,' marking a significant moment in the fashion industry's embrace of denim. The endorsement signaled that jeans, once strictly workwear, had entered the realm of high fashion and leisurewear. This validation from a leading fashion publication helped broaden the market for jeans beyond working-class men to include women and the urban elite.

Vogue's endorsement of jeans as 'Western chic' represented the intersection of fashion and literature, as the magazine had long been an arbiter of cultural taste that influenced poets and writers. The phrase itself entered the lexicon of style writing, a genre that poets from Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery would engage with in their explorations of urban culture. The event also illustrated the way that denim, like poetry, could move between the vernacular and the elite, a fluidity that postmodern poets would celebrate.