The basic design for blue jeans was patented in 1873. That version of work pants was the first to incorporate copper rivets at key locations on the ‘dungarees’. The addition of those copper rivets was the brainchild of Mr Jacob W Davis, a tailor from Reno, Nevada. Through his work, Jacob had seen first hand how the wear problem was wasting otherwise solid work pants, so he came up with, and successfully tested, his rivet idea. Jacob knew he had a revolutionary design but he didn’t have the funds to patent the idea on his own or to mass produce and distribute the product.
The guy he bought most of the fabric that he used in his tailoring business was Levi Strauss, who was working as the West Coast distributor for his older brothers’ wholesale dry goods business back in New York. Levi Strauss had been born in Germany, but his mother moved the family to America after her husband died of tuberculosis when Levi was 18. Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis obviously hit it off because it was Levi who Jacob turned to with his idea of adding copper rivets to reinforce work pants and proposed that they file the patent together. The addition of the rivets was genius, but Levi must have been a pretty darn good salesman too because it wasn’t long before the reinforced work pants caught on.
Hard working miners, cattlemen, farmers, and factory workers were the main purchasers of these sorts of ‘waist overalls’ and the version that they bought from Levi Strauss had a button fly, two front pockets, and one right-handed pocket on the back. There was no need for belt loops since men of the time wore suspenders. (Jeans worn with suspenders. Just saying.) Those early ancestors of today’s jeans were made out of cotton twill but that was soon changed to denim (which is a tougher and rougher material) and the key to their durability was the placement of those copper rivets at the pocket openings and also at the base of the front fly, making them longer wearing and more resilient to everyday hard work. Once production started to escalate, there was also a riveted pocket added within the right front pocket that was intended to hold a pocket watch. These days we can maybe squeeze a quarter into that little pocket, but how were they to know we’d end up wearing them so tight?
Jacob Davis, although he was mentioned as half of the team to submit the patent for the jeans—contributing the design, choice of materials, and the rivet idea—moved his family to San Francisco in order to run the factory for Levi Strauss who was clearly the business guy of the partnership. Jacob also came up with the idea of stitching a double line of orange thread into a fancy pattern on that one back pocket so that people would know at a glance whether the pants were original Levi’s. Clever guy. That same design is still used on the back pockets to this day.
In 1890, the working number of 501 was given to a version of the XX Waist Overall. This was also the year that Levi Strauss incorporated the company with his nephews (maybe Jacob Davis was busy keeping the factory running and couldn’t get away?) and by the time Levi passed away in 1902 the company was solely embedded within the Strauss family.
Before Levi passed, he added that second pocket onto the back of the waist overalls, and with that, the five-pocket design was established. Belt loops weren’t added to the waistband until 1922.
The popularity of jeans went through a bit of a slowdown during the World Wars but once James Dean showed up wearing them in Rebel Without A Cause in 1955, they gained their second wind as a symbol of youthful rebellion. Then when the hippies latched onto them in the late 60s and into the 70s (looking for something else to embroider), they became completely indispensable for pretty much every wardrobe. Jeans went through a complicated maturation period in the 1980s, just ask Brooke Shields, but as with other stuff that the 80s tortured, time has allowed everyone to step back and reset things a bit more reasonably.
These days, we still wear them as work pants, and in fact, they are as valuable to a farming or Western uniform as are the right boots and hat, but we also wear jeans to the office, to socialize, to go out to restaurants, and even to church.
As so often happens, those responsible for the fashion trends in society insist on taking things too far. One way this plays out these days is that our jeans are purchased with a well-worn patina already in place. Not a soul has ever pulled the jeans on, but they are manufactured to look as though they’ve been passed down through the family for generations. Pre-fading on the thighs and butt is a must, as well as the peculiar addition of ‘whiskering’ at the crotch. That even sounds wrong! We have demanded that rips and fraying be added prior to purchase because we just don’t have the time or patience, or the lifestyle quite honestly, to add any character to them ourselves. And for these factory-added benefits, we are willing to pay crazy amounts of money. Oh, if Jacob and Levi could see us now!
There was a pair of jeans sold to a Mr Soloman Warner, in 1893. He owned a dry goods store in Tucson and presumably bought this pair directly from Levi Strauss himself. At that time, waist overalls sold for $1.25 USD per pair. Mr Warner didn’t really have a chance to break his new pair in before he fell ill and passed away. His jeans were folded up and stored in a trunk someplace until they were rediscovered and sold at auction in 2018 for almost $100,000 USD. Jeans today can still be seen as investment pieces, but they have nowhere near THAT sort of return rate.
Although I doubt that the purchaser of the late Mr Warner’s jeans ever wears them around the house or out for drinks with friends, they would probably still fit right in because, as the Levi’s slogan states, “Quality Never Goes Out of Style”.
