blue stockings = blue jeans?

The good old OED, eh. I was under the impression that bluestocking was a (pejorative?) reference to academic women's dress. But oh boy wrong again. It was the men who wore them. Was this the eighteenth century drawing room version of a casual friday?

blue-stocking, n. SECOND EDITION 1989 ( k ) Also Blue-stocking, etc. [As an attributive phrase, with the sense of ‘wearing blue stockings’, this is found as early as the 17th c. (see 1a.); in its transferred sense it originated in connexion with re-unions held in London about 1750, at the houses of Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Vesey, and Mrs. Ord, who exerted themselves to substitute for the card-playing, which then formed the chief recreation at evening parties, more intellectual modes of spending the time, including conversation on literary subjects, in which eminent men of letters often took part. Many of those who attended eschewed ‘full dress’; one of these was Mr. Benjamin Stillingfleet, who habitually wore grey or ‘blue’ worsted, instead of black silk stockings. In reference to this, Admiral Boscawen is said (Sir W. Forbes Life of Beattie (1806) I. 210 note) to have derisively dubbed the coterie ‘the Blue Stocking Society’ (as not constituting a dressed assembly). The ladies who supported the reform were at first called Blue Stockingers, Blue Stocking Ladies, and at length, about 1790, when the actual origin of the term was remembered by few, Blue Stockings, in later slang abbreviated to Blues.]