Denim makers try to give jeans a new flare.

• Position: Old Boy Network Inc. - Tar Heel Tattler

Denim makers try to give jeans a new flare

A new cut on an old favorite may bring some extra green to North Carolina denim makers.

Bell-bottom jeans are back -- back in production, at least.

"We are projecting sales of $7 million to $10 million by June of 1991," says Steven Weiss, president of the Old Boy Network, a Greensboro company licensed in January by Hoffman Apparel International Corp. of Boston to manufacture and market Landlubber jeans. Landlubbers, which helped make the jeans the Beatles wore fashionable, came out in 1964 and were manufactured until the late '70s, when the bottom dropped out of bells.

The way Weiss sees it, Landlubber is poised to zip up the juniors and young men's markets by putting the trend-hungry offspring of flower children into bell bottoms. The new, streamlined edition sports a trimmer bell, a higher rise in the seat and a contemporary price -- $44 a pair, compared with $7 to $10 a quarter of a century ago.

"Landlubber's potential could be substantial -- 500,000 to 1 million yards annually," says Phillip Lair, Southeast sales rep for Burlington Denim, a division of Burlington Industries. That's good because jean sales are sagging. Jeanswear...