Peggy Caserta, the lesbian creator of bell-bottom jeans and lover of Janis Joplin, has died at age 84

Peggy Caserta, a lover of rock icon Janis Joplin, has died at age 84.

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Caserta died last Thursday at her home, a cabin on the Tillamook River in Oregon, Deadlinereports. Her death was due to natural causes.

She was born in 1940 in Louisiana. She worked as a New York City-based flight attendant — unhappily — for a period before moving to San Francisco in the mid-1960s. She opened a clothing boutique there in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a center for hippies.

“Already living openly as a lesbian when that was a rarity even within the ostensibly liberal, though thoroughly heteronormative hippie culture, Caserta boldly called her new Haight-Ashbury shop Mnasidika after a character in the iconic Sappho-inspired poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis,” Deadline notes.

She dressed the Grateful Dead and other musicians, and created what came to be known as bell-bottom jeans, which she eventually got Levi Strauss to make for her store.

Caserta came up with the idea for the jeans after seeing a woman wearing a version.

“One of the early hippie-ish type girls had split the side seam on her boyfriend’s jeans, Levi’s, and inserted a paisley triangle,” she explained to Levi Strauss, according to a 2019 article on the company's website. Caserta then paid the woman to make some with denim. When the woman refused to make more, Caserta went to Levi Strauss and struck a deal with the company.

Caserta met Joplin, her neighbor on Haight Street, in 1966. They greeted each other one morning, and that night Caserta went to see Joplin sing with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The performance was “powerful and mind altering,” Caserta wrote in her second memoir, I Ran Into Some Trouble. Later, Joplin went into Caserta’s boutique to buy some jeans on layaway, and Caserta gifted her with them.

“A fast friendship had begun, one that would include voracious sexual appetites and an equally enthusiastic devotion to heroin,” Deadline reports.

However, neither Caserta nor Joplin described their relationship as girlfriends or lovers. Caserta has said she believes Joplin was straight but “wild,” although Joplin had several female romantic partners.

“I adored her. I loved her,” Caserta told New York Magazine’s Vulture blog in 2018. “But to be her lover was to resign yourself to being invisible, and as hard as it may be for people to understand now, I thought I was as groovy as her.”

Their relationship lasted four years. Caserta was with Joplin when the singer performed at Woodstock in 1969, and the two were supposed to be together on the final night of Joplin’s life, October 3, 1970, for a three-way with Seth Morgan, a man with whom Joplin had just begun a relationship. But “either through miscommunication or druggy inertia,” as Deadline puts it, neither Caserta nor Morgan arrived at Joplin’s hotel room in Los Angeles; the singer had been recording her final album, Pearl, at an L.A. studio. Joplin died early the next day after shooting heroin, aged 27.

Caserta asserted in I Ran Into Some Trouble that Joplin’s death was due not to a drug overdose but to a fall and a broken nose that caused her to suffocate from blood.

Caserta regretted missing the rendezvous with Joplin, she told Vulture. “Some people say, ‘Oh, we lost her so young,’ Caserta said. “Well, for me, I regret that we lost her at all. I figured we’d be friends forever. I regret that I wasn’t there that night when she tripped and fell. I could have picked her up.”

Caserta continued to be addicted to heroin, and she published her first memoir, Going Down With Janis, in 1973. She has disavowed much of the book, blaming her ghostwriter, Dan Knapp. She said she received $2,000 for it, which all went to her heroin habit. But many LGBTQ+ people welcomed the book for revealing Joplin’s queerness.

Caserta didn’t deny their relationship, but in her second memoir, she wrote, “That book, that lurid and graphic sexual content and the drug scenes depicted, hurt everyone.” I Ran Into Some Trouble, which Caserta penned with a friend, Maggie Falcon, was published by Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing in Oregon in 2018.

Caserta eventually overcame her drug habit and spent several years caring for her mother, who was suffering from dementia, beginning in 2005. After that stint in Louisiana, Caserta settled into her cabin on the Oregon coast, and “she loved the community” there, the Tillamook County Pioneernotes. She leaves no immediate survivors.