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In 1976, Jodie Foster, Billie Perkins and Robert De Niro performed a scene in New York City in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
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In the waning days of the California Gold Rush, the wife of a local miner faced a problem.
Her husband’s denim work pants kept tearing, so her tailor, Jacob Davis, came up with the idea of adding copper rivets to key tension points, like pocket corners and the bottom of the button fly, to keep them from ripping.
Davis’ “Studded Pants” quickly became a huge success and, unbeknownst to him at the time, marked the official birth of blue jeans, a garment that would change fashion and represent America around the world.
“It really democratized American fashion, our biggest export to the world, because people distinguished jeans from American Western culture,” said Shawn Grain Carter, a fashion professor at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. “It didn’t matter what your economic or social class was. It didn’t matter what your political views were. Everybody wore denim.”
Jacob Davis
Courtesy: Levi Strauss & Company
Today, denim has become a major sales driver for retailers large and small, with the global denim market reaching $101 billion this year, up 28% from 2020, according to market research firm Euromonitor International. Major clothing companies come from american eagle arrive Levi Strauss yes Competing for market shareIt relies on A-list stars such as Sydney Sweeney and Beyonce to win over shoppers and drive sales amid an uncertain economy.
But without Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous blue jeans company, Davis’ invention might not have spread far beyond the confines of the railroad town where it was founded in the early 1870s.
How Levi’s Created Blue Jeans
Tracey Panek, Levi’s in-house historian, said that soon after Davis invented the studded pants, then known as “waist dungarees” or “dungarees,” they began selling like hotcakes and he needed a business partner to secure a patent. So he wrote to Strauss, a Bavarian-born immigrant who ran a successful wholesale business in San Francisco, and provided Davis with the denim he used to make studded pants.
“These penter’s secrets are the rivets I carry in my pocket, and I find the demand is so great that I cannot make them fast enough,” Davis wrote to Strauss in a letter, According to PBS.
Levi Strauss
Courtesy: Levi Strauss & Company
Panek said Strauss was a “shrewd” businessman who recognized the opportunity and agreed to work with Davis.
“This will be the first time Levi’s actually” makes its own product, Panek said. “He no longer just imports and sells other people’s goods. He makes his own and sells to retailers.”
The two received a patent for riveted pants on May 20, 1873, and eventually opened a factory on Fremont Street, near the modern Salesforce Building in San Francisco’s Financial District.
They promised to provide workers with the most durable jeans on the market, and soon, business was booming.
ranchers and american workers
Through Strauss’s connections as a wholesaler, the company’s riveted overalls soon spread throughout the United States, becoming the garment of choice for workers everywhere: miners, cowboys, farmers—any role that required durable clothing.
At the time, jeans were exclusively for the workplace, but as emerging denim manufacturers competed for a similar customer base, they looked to expand their product offerings to drive sales.
“Slowly and steadily into the 20th century, you started to see some manufacturers making changes,” says New York fashion historian Sonya Abrego. “There was a design called a spring bottom, which was more form-fitting, dressy, slightly flared, and maybe something a factory foreman would wear, right? Not just someone on the shop floor.”
In 1934, Levi created the first line of women’s jeans. Around that time, denim began to become more popular in settings outside of work, primarily for activities such as vacationing, camping, and horseback riding.
“So they’re kind of like cowboy clothing or working class clothing, but wearing it at…resorts,” Abrego said.
Courtesy: Levi Strauss & Company
Playboy Ranch vacations became popular because there were finally highways connecting different parts of the country, and few people were willing to risk traveling to Europe during the war. According to advertising archives from the time, companies like Levi’s began advertising their denim as “fancy ranch denim” and “authentic western riding wear” to attract shoppers looking to take jeans with them on vacation.
These cultural moments helped expand denim beyond working people, but it wasn’t until after World War II when American fashion overall began to shift that jeans became widespread casual wear.
The rise of backyard barbecues
At the end of World War II, the powerful American consumer began to emerge. For years, Americans were forced to ration common goods like rubber, sugar, and meat while being encouraged to save money by buying war bonds and hoarding idle cash.
As the country transitioned from wartime to peacetime, Americans were ready to spend money and were quick to invest heavily in new cars, appliances, and clothes.
“As you spend a little more money, you start to see a bigger push for casual clothing, fun clothing, play clothing, backyard barbecue clothing,” Abrego said. “What we think of as clothing today is like casual style.”
Courtesy: Levi Strauss & Company
Slowly and surely, it’s becoming more and more acceptable for men and women to wear jeans outside of the workplace. Denim manufacturers then pushed jeans into schools.
“They want to sell the product to as many people as possible,” Abrego said. “Jeans are school-friendly, which means they’re appropriate for everyday wear.”
By the 1960s, denim manufacturers expanded their product range to sell a variety of colors, fits and styles. It became a symbol of the hippie movement and a mainstay in Hollywood.
Soon, denim was everywhere, and the 1970s brought the iconic bell-bottom jeans and the first “designer jeans”—jeans produced by brands and brands whose designs had nothing to do with workwear or suits, such as Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt.
Since then, denim has been a fixture on the global fashion scene. While silhouettes, washes and fits change over time, jeans never go out of style, which is why they’re so timeless, Abrego said.
“This is an 1873 design… are there any other 1873 designs that we see on the street? That’s kind of crazy if you think about it,” Abrego said. “We can talk about all the details, all the variations in manufacturing and all the different styles and finishes, but it’s one identifiable thing, it’s still a pair of jeans. That continuity is so compelling to me as a historian because I can’t really name anything else that has stayed the same to this extent.”
