By ERIC WILSON


The $300 pair of designer jeans is now, courtesy of the recession, the $200 pair of designer jeans.

“It was all just a fad,” said Jeff Rudes, a founder of the hot-denim-label-du-jour J Brand Jeans and an astute observer of the suspiciously inflated prices of fashion’s most eternally reinvented staple. Like any commodity that becomes overpriced, there eventually comes a market correction. And denim’s day of reckoning was long overdue.

“The floors at most of the major stores were so overassorted that they almost looked like Loehmann’s,” Mr. Rudes said. “They were just cramming jeans onto the racks.”

The introduction of $300 jeans marked the moment when customers really began to question the prices they were seeing in department stores. Cotton dungarees for the price of an iPod was a stretch so extreme that retailers had to come up with a whole new term to suggest that the new jeans were different from the $100 jeans they used to sell in the 1990s.

So, early in the decade designer jeans became “premium” jeans - as in, you had to pay a premium to wear them: $340 for Acne jeans, $350 for Ksubi jeans, $580 for Dior jeans and so on. Before the recession, premium denim was one of the fastest growing categories of the apparel business, and there seemed to be no limit to what customers would pay for the latest label, fit, finish or wash.

But the denim bubble has burst, and only a handful of such extravagantly priced jeans remain at the jeans bar - labels like PRPS and 45rpm, which, in tacit acknowledgment of the decline of the premium business, are now more often referred to as “artisanal” jeans. Meanwhile, designer jeans have relocated to a neighborhood just below $200, even though the styles do not look substantially different from the $300 jeans that were on the sales floors of Barneys New York only two years ago.

“The key price is under $200 now,” said Eric Jennings, the men’s fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “The superexpensive stuff is not performing as well.”

Designer denim is still one of the few bright spots of the apparel industry. Annual sales of all women’s jeans were actually up 5 percent over last year to $8.2 billion through August, though average prices were down 1 percent, according to the research firm NPD - the pricing shift is reflective of a broader reset taking place in luxury stores.

During the modern gilded age, the spiraling prices of designer clothes had more to do with driving profits than the actual design or construction of a garment. Designers found they could charge a lot for the perception of prestige. Dresses and suits and handbags were priced like cars, and consumers didn’t hesitate. But with jeans, it just felt more obvious that some kind of game was being played; the basic elements, after all, had not changed substantially in decades: five pockets, cotton, some rivets.