In people's minds, jeans used to be all about Marilyn Monroe

In people's minds, jeans used to be all about Marilyn Monroe Until now, there were only fragmented written records to rely on to document the shipments of the low-cost fabric that flooded from Genoa into northern Europe -- and especially England -- in the mid-17th century.

But art historians believe the newly-discovered works were painted somewhere around Venice, suggesting that jeans have Italian, rather than French, ancestry.

"In people's minds, jeans used to be all about Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, about the United States," said Francois Girbaud, a designer who helped curate the exhibition."Nimes or Genoa? I don't have the answer. But it's amusing to think that jeans already existed in 1655."