Double – heck – triple your denim this year as the classic fabric moves from fashion catwalks to the streets of Adelaide.

When Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears wore their iconic ensembles to the 2001 MTV awards, the denim-on-denim look took off for a far wider audience than ranchers and farm hands.

As far as trends go, double denim is often the target of ridicule. Its nickname, the ‘Canadian Tuxedo’ is meant to imply a lack of sophistication, but heading into winter 2019 CityMag has to ask: who would you rather – Trump or Trudeau?

Fashion weeks MBFWA and VAMFF featured heavy denim on their most recent catwalks and even looking at the streets of Adelaide CityMag can see denim layering as a way people are keeping warm this winter.

Co-owner of Ebenezer Place’s iconic Midwest Trader, Kate Tomkins, has seen denim rise and fall in her more than twenty years in retail, so who better to give context to the resurgent denim trend in Adelaide.

Established in 1992, the vintage clothing store struck a sweet spot in the late ’90s and their business boomed in correlation to the rise of the double denim craze.

“For us, in the ’90s, pretty much 90 per cent of my stock was vintage Levi’s 501s so I was just really known as the Levi’s jeans store that was bringing in all the vintage Levi’s from LA,” Kate says.

“To me, denim is always about American denim so it’s kind of about something that’s iconic, timeless, goes with everything, and gets character. As you wear it, it looks better. You get the fades and the holes so it kind of ends up telling a story.”

While pretty commonplace back in the 90s, double denim outfits are now seen as fashion statements and, with A-listers like Gigi Hadid perpetuating the trend, the Canadian tuxedo might just be making its comeback in 2019.

2019: New season Levi’s

“I think it’s funny that people kind of reference double denim as though it’s wacky because I’ve always worn double denim, if not triple denim a lot of the time,” Kate laughs.

Kate describes her ideal triple-denim outfit as a vintage Wrangler denim shirt from the ’90s; a ’70s Wrangler denim jacket, slim-lined and rock ‘n’ roll; and, of course, Levi’s jeans.

“I love Levi’s, I’ve always sold it. I’ve got about 10 books at home on the history of Levi’s. We collect it, we have Levi’s that go back to the 1950s at home so it’s the true sort of frontier denim, the true Western denim. It’s kind of how it started,” Kate says.

“You know, the real denim has to come from like a Levi’s factory and has to be a certain weight and a certain loom. I’m not into that kind of fast fashion denim that lasts for three months. That’s why our vintage goes back to the ’70s. It does last forever, you get decades out of it.”

And, with good quality denim and even the slightest sense of style, just about anyone can pull off double denim.

“I don’t think it needs to be too matchy-matchy. You want a little bit of difference in the colour tone of your denim. You don’t want it spot-on like one colour straight through,” Kate says.

So, while the double denim trend dips in and out of mainstream fashion, the denim movement itself is still going strong and here to stay.

“It’s never going to die out. People are always going to want to wear jeans. Levi’s started in the late 1800s so denim’s been around for that long. I can’t see that it would ever die out or fade away,” says Kate.