Celebrating 152 years of jeans

On 20 May 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob William Davis received a US patent for the process of putting rivets in men’s work trousers, marking the birth of what would become a fashion staple worldwide. Although denim trousers had been around as work wear for many years, it was the act of placing rivets in the trousers that created what we now call jeans. These trousers were originally called “waist overalls” or “overalls” until 1960, when baby boomers adopted the name “jeans.” The word “jeans” comes from a twilled cotton fabric called Genoa fustian, often used to make men’s work wear.

Loeb (Levi) Strauss was born on 26 February 1829 in Buttenheim, Bavaria. He grew up with three older sisters and three older brothers. He arrived in America in 1847 with his mother and sisters. His father died of TB when he was 16. His mother decided to move to New York, where her two eldest sons ran a dry goods business, J. Strauss Brother & Co. Levi worked for his brothers in New York and learnt the business. Fabric was one of the brothers’ specialities. At one stage, he moved to Kentucky, where he became a peddler, walking from settlement to settlement carrying his goods on his back. When he heard about the gold rush in California, he left New York in 1853 for California aboard a steamship sailing around the southern tip of South America. In San Francisco he established “Levi Strauss & Co.”, supplying clothing, fabric, tools, canvas for tents, bedding, shoes, and sewing supplies. Later, he opened up shops on the outskirts of San Francisco. By 1866, Levi had built a successful business and was a local philanthropist. Levi died on 26 September 1902. He never married and had no children. He left his company to his nephew Jacob Stern.

Jacob William Davis (1831-1908) was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, Latvia. He trained as a tailor. In 1854, at the age of 23, he arrived in New York City. His first job was as a journeyman tailor in New York. During the next few years, he moved between San Francisco, Maine, and Canada. In 1856 he moved to San Francisco and then Weaverville. In 1858 he moved to western Canada and decided to try his hand at gold panning along the Fraser River. He wasn’t successful at that. In Canada he met a German immigrant, Annie Parksher, and married her in 1865 in Canada. They had six children. In 1868, the family moved to Virginia City, Nevada. Jacob invested in a brewery, but that was not successful. Jacob started a tailoring business on Virginia Street in Reno, Nevada, in 1869, producing horse blankets, tents, and wagon covers. He used heavy-duty cotton duck and denim fabric, which he purchased from Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco.

A year later, Jacob expanded his business to make work-overall clothing for railroad workers, miners, and farmers. The wife of a local woodcutter asked Jacob to make a sturdy pair of trousers for her husband. Jacob came up with the idea to put metal rivets at points of strain, like pocket corners and the base of the button fly. He was paid $3 for the trousers. The trousers were an instant hit. Jacob decided to take out a patent on the process but needed a business partner. In 1872 he wrote a letter to Levi, from whom he purchased the cloth to make his riveted trousers. As Jacob didn’t have the money for the necessary paperwork, he suggested that Levi provide the funds and that the two men get the patent together. Levi saw the potential for this new product and agreed to Jacob’s proposal. In 1872, the two men filed a US patent application, which was granted on 20 May 1873 as patent number 139,121 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 1874 they defended their patent in a federal court case. Jacob testified to how he came to make the first pair of jeans, his trouble obtaining a patent, and how he enlisted the help of Levi Strauss.

Levi brought Jacob to San Francisco to oversee the first manufacturing facility for “waist ”. They made the first trousers out of canvas and dyed them dark blue to hide stains. Later on they switched to denim. The trademarked double-row stitching on the back pockets was also Jacob’s design. At first they employed seamstresses working out of their homes, but by the 1880s, Levi had opened his own factory. The trousers were initially called “XX”, as they were considered extra, extra strong. They were sold as working wear to miners, cowboys and labourers. In 1890, they were called “501s”, after their lot number. Levis were a “fair trade” item. A fair-traded item was one that the manufacturer set the price limit on. In 1906, four years after Levi’s death and two years before his death, Jacob signed over his rights in the patent to Levi Strauss & Co. Jacob’s son, Simon, became head of the Levi’s Manufacturing Co. after his father’s death in 1908. By the 1920s, Levi’s denim waist overalls were the top-selling men’s work trousers in the United States. Today the Levi Strauss Company is a privately held company with over 16,000 employees and revenue that exceeds $4.5 billion.

Prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s, blue jeans were considered working-class. The denim companies realised that workers and farmers struggling to feed their families weren’t in the market for new jeans, so they adjusted their marketing towards the middle class. Hollywood westerns, with horseback-riding heroes in jeans, also helped. In 1934, Levi Strauss introduced “Lady Levi’s”. Blue jeans were only made with button flies, but in 1947 Levi’s offered zippers for the first time, primarily to appeal to women. Jeans got a further boost when movie stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean made them a symbol of youthful rebellion in 1950s movies. In the 1970s, fashion designers Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt, among others, put denim on the fashion runway, and the price went up. In the 1990s, the idea of “Casual Fridays” emerged as a way to raise company morale without boosting salaries, and office workers started wearing blue jeans to the office.

While the US popularised jeans, denim’s origin is in England, although France is the origin of the word “denim”. In the 1600s, weavers in Nîmes, France, developed a durable fabric known as “serge de Nîmes” and used it to make sailors’ trousers. It was woven from wool and silk. Denim is all or mostly cotton. The English textile was given a French name. England, at the time, had immense reserves of cotton and indigo from its colonies in India and the Americas. Indigo is the plant-based dye that puts the blue in blue jeans. The fabric arrived in the American colonies well before the Revolution of 1776. The phrase “serge denim breeches” appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper as early as 1723, describing clothing worn by a runaway ship hand.

The frame building on Virginia Street that housed Jacob’s tailor shop was destroyed in Reno’s first great fire on 29 October 1873. In 2006, Reno honoured Jacob by placing a historical marker on the west side of Virginia Street, between Second Street and Commercial Row, where his shop stood in December 1871, when he created the first “waist overalls.”