Blue Jeans (Edited from Wikipedia)

SUMMARY

Jeans are a type of pants, typically made from denim or dungaree cloth. Often the term "jeans" refers to a particular style of pants, called "blue jeans," which were invented by Jacob W. Davis in partnership with Levi Strauss & Co. in 1871 and patented by Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss on May 20, 1873.

Prior to the Levi Strauss patented trousers, the term "blue jeans" had been long in use for various garments (including trousers, overalls, and coats), constructed from blue colored denim.

Originally designed for cowboys and miners, jeans became popular in the 1950s among teenagers, especially members of the greaser subculture. Jeans were a common fashion item in the 1960s hippie subculture and they continued to be popular in the 1970s and 1980s youth subcultures of punk rock and heavy metal. Historic brands include Levi's, Lee, and Wrangler. Today, jeans remain a popular fashion item and come in various fits.

HISTORY

Research on the trade of jean fabric shows that it emerged in the cities of Genoa, Italy, and Nîmes, France. Gênes, the French word for Genoa, may be the origin of the word "jeans".

In Nîmes, weavers tried to reproduce jean but instead developed a similar twill fabric that became known as denim, from de Nîmes, meaning "from Nîmes". Genoa’s jean was a fustian textile of "medium quality and of reasonable cost", very similar to cotton corduroy for which Genoa was famous, and was "used for work clothes in general".

The Genoese navy equipped its sailors with jeans, as they needed a fabric which could be worn wet or dry. Nîmes’s "denim" was coarser, considered higher quality, and was used "for over garments such as smocks or overalls". Nearly all Indigo, needed for dyeing, came from indigo bush plantations in Lahore (a city in Pakistan) till the late 19th century. It was replaced by indigo synthesis methods developed in Germany.

1 By the 17th century, jean was a crucial textile for working-class people in Northern Italy. This is seen in a series of genre paintings from around the 17th century attributed to an artist now named The Master of the Blue Jeans. The ten paintings depict impoverished scenes with lower-class figures wearing a fabric that looks like denim. The fabric would have been Genoese jean, which was cheaper.

Dungaree was mentioned for the first time in the 17th century, when it was referred to as cheap, coarse thick cotton cloth, often colored blue but sometimes white, worn by impoverished people in what was then a region of Bombay, India a dockside village called Dongri. This cloth was "dungri" in Hindi. Dungri was exported to England and used for manufacturing of cheap, robust working clothes. It was rumored that men would carry dead dung beetles in their pocket for luck. In English, the word "dungri" became pronounced as "dungaree".

The term jeans appears first in 1795, when a Swiss banker by the name Jean-Gabriel Eynard and his brother Jacques went to Genoa and both were soon heading a flourishing commercial concern. In 1800 Massena's troops entered the town and Jean- Gabriel was entrusted with their supply. In particular he furnished them with uniforms cut from blue cloth called "bleu de Genes" whence later derives the famous garment known worldwide as "blue jeans".

Levi Strauss, as a young man in 1851, went from Germany to New York to join his older brothers who ran a goods store. In 1853, he moved to San Francisco to open his own dry goods business. Jacob Davis was a tailor who often bought bolts of cloth from the Levi Strauss & Co. wholesale house. In 1872, Davis wrote to Strauss asking to partner with him to patent and sell clothing reinforced with rivets. The copper rivets were to reinforce the points of stress, such as pocket corners and at the bottom of the button fly. Levi accepted Davis's offer, and the two men received US patent No. 139,121 for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings" on May 20, 1873.

Davis and Strauss experimented with different fabrics. An early attempt was brown cotton duck, a bottom-weight fabric. Finding denim a more suitable material for work- pants, they began using it to manufacture their riveted pants. The denim used was produced by an American manufacturer. Popular legend incorrectly states that it was imported from Nimes, France. A popular myth is that Strauss initially sold brown canvas pants to miners, later dyed them blue, turned to using denim, and only after Davis wrote to him, added rivets.

Initially, Strauss' jeans were simply sturdy trousers worn by factory workers, miners, farmers, and cattlemen throughout the North American West. During this period, men's jeans had the fly down the front, whereas women's jeans had the fly down the

2 left side. When Levi Strauss & Co. patented the modern, mass-produced prototype in the year 1873, there were two pockets in the front and one on the back with copper rivets. Later, the jeans were redesigned to today's industry standard of 5 pockets including a little watch pocket and copper rivets.

JACOB DAVIS

Jacob W. Davis (1831–1908) was a Latvian-Jewish tailor and American immigrant. He was born to a Jewish family in the city of Riga, then Russian Empire, today Latvia, in 1831. During his time in Riga city, he trained and worked as a tailor.

In 1854, at the age of 23, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States, arriving in New York City where he changed his name to Jacob Davis. There he ran a tailors shop before moving to Maine and then, in 1856, San Francisco before moving on to Weatherville.

After this short spell in America, during which time it is believed he worked as a journeyman tailor, in 1858 Davis left California and moved to Western Canada to try to find more profitable work. There, Davis met a German immigrant, Annie Parksher, whom he married and together, Jacob and Annie had six children. During his time in Canada, Davis worked at the Fraser River panning for gold.

In January 1867, Davis returned to San Francisco with Annie and his family. Later that year, they moved to Virginia City, Nevada where he sold wholesale tobacco and pork before beginning work once more as a tailor. By 1868, the family had moved, this time to Reno, Nevada which at that time was a tiny railroad town and there he helped Frederick Hertlein build a brewery. 1869 saw Davis revert to his original trade, opening a tailor shop in the main street of the town.

In his tailor shop, Davis made functional items such as tents, horse blankets and wagon covers for the railway workers on the Central Pacific Railroad. The fabric Davis worked with was heavy-duty cotton duck cloth and cotton denim which he bought from Levi Strauss & Co., a dry goods company in San Francisco. To strengthen the stress points of the sewn items he was making, Davis used copper rivets to reinforce the stitching.

In December 1870, Davis was asked by a customer to make a pair of strong working pants for her husband who was a woodcutter. To create suitably robust pants for working, he used duck cloth and reinforced the weak points in the seams and pockets with the copper rivets. Such was the success of these pants that word spread throughout the laborers along the railroad. Davis was making these working pants in duck cotton

3 and, as early as 1871, in denim cotton. Before long, he found he could not keep up with demand.

LEVIS STRAUSS

Levi Strauss (February 26, 1829 – September 26, 1902) was a German-American businessman who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm, Levi Strauss & Co., began in 1853 in San Francisco, California.

Levi Strauss was born in Buttenheim, on February 26, 1829, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, in the German Confederation, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife Rebecca Strauss. At the age of 18, Strauss, his mother and two sisters traveled to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co.

Levi's sister Fanny and her husband David Stern moved to St. Louis, Missouri, while Levi went to live in Louisville, Kentucky, and sold his brothers' supplies in Kentucky. In January 1853, Levi Strauss became an American citizen.

The family decided to open a West Coast branch of the family dry goods business in San Francisco, which was the commercial hub of the California Gold Rush. Levi was chosen to represent the family and he took a steamship for San Francisco, arriving in early March 1853, where he joined his sister's family.

Strauss opened his dry goods wholesale business as Levi Strauss & Co. and imported fine dry goods—clothing, bedding, combs, purses, handkerchiefs—from his brothers in New York. He made tents, and later jeans. Levi lived with Fanny's growing family.

Jacob Davis, one of Strauss's customers and one of the inventors of riveted denim pants in 1871, went into business with Strauss to produce blue jeans. The two men patented the new style of work pants in 1873.

Strauss had set up a large tailor shop in San Francisco for the production of Davis' working pants and Jacob and his family had moved back to San Francisco for Davis to run this shop. As demand continued to grow, the shop was superseded by a manufacturing plant which Davis managed for Strauss. Davis continued to work there for the remainder of his life, overseeing production of the work pants as well as other lines including work shirts and overalls.

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