The denim jean began its run in the late 1880s as the outerwear of choice for miners in gold-rushing California, appealing for its toughness and durability.
But in its 21st-century incarnation, the garment is more often spotted in temperature-controlled shared office spaces, relaxing by the cold-brew coffee spigot, or covering CrossFit-toned laps supporting MacBooks, as the defacto uniform of the yuppie entrepreneur. Rivets optional.
A Wellesley startup called FYT Jeans, founded by a biomedical professor and an MIT alum, launched this year with the goal of reimagining jeans for the less rigorous lifestyles of the perpetually seated office set.
Co-founder Elazer Edelman, a professor at the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center whose usual areas of expertise include tissue engineering and cardiac biology, met textile engineer Miguel Carvalho, then a director of programming at MIT’s Portugal campus, at a faculty retreat in 2011.
Carvalho had been researching clothing for mobility-constrained people with disabilities – people who may spend hours in a wheelchair and could benefit from well-fitting and comfortable clothes designed for that posture.
Edelman and Carvalho discussed the possibility of bringing this line to a broader market of people who sit.
Four years later the duo launched a company and this month teased their first product on Kickstarter — bendy jeans for people who sit. They hope to raise $30,000 by January 4. The campaign was first reported by BostInno.
“If we can put comfort in jeans we can put comfort in any kind of material. That was the challenge,” Carvalho said of his styles, described as “The World’s Most Comfortable Jeans.”
FYT’s $85 products feature some of Carvalho’s design modifications: Stretchy inserts in the waistband make room for an expanding mid-section when the wearer sits; a discreet zipper at the back of the garment that could be undone to increase the length of the garment’s crotch to avoid dipping in the back and bunching in front.
With a darker wash, the “Entrepreneur Jean” lacks both wrinkles and irony; the lighter “Dean Jean” offers a more casual look. Both are designed in men’s and women’s styles.
The founders are looking to Kickstarter as a reality check for their product. “It does give us instantaneous feedback on how the product is received,” Edelman said. A key goal with the campaign is to seek a variety of partners to help with sales, manufacturing, and long-term investment.