Denim: A Riveting History 

Denim: A Riveting History 

You cannot tell the story of denim without mentioning one brand: Levi’s.

The company’s story starts with two men. The first is the Bavarian-born Levi Strauss, who moved to San Francisco in 1853 at the age of 23 to expand his family’s dry goods business to the West Coast during the lucrative Gold Rush. The second is the less well-known Jacob Davis, a fellow immigrant from Riga in the Baltic.

In 1870, Davis was set a seemingly run-of-the-mill task in his workshop in Reno, Nevada. A local woodcutter’s wife commissioned him to make a pair of sturdy trousers for her unusually-sized husband that would survive a season of hard labor. Davis accepted the job and the $3 advance that it paid, setting to work with a roll of white cotton duck fabric purchased in San Francisco from none other than Strauss.

So far, so ordinary. But Davis’s eureka moment came when his eyes fell onto a pile of copper rivets that happened to be in his workshop from a previous job. The idea to attach them at key stress points, creating a more rugged and hardwearing product, was a flash of genius. He sold a further 10 pairs that summer and the reputation of his superior waist overalls, which they were then called, spread fast.

In need of a business partner. Davis’s thoughts turned to the man who had sold him the initial fabric all those years ago, and in 1872 he penned a letter to Strauss. On May 20, 1873, the two men were granted patent number 139.121 for the “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” The patent was the birth certificate of the modern jean, setting out in black-and-white the creation that would secure Strauss and Davis’ position in denim history.

So this May 20, let us all celebrate blue jeans and thank Strauss and Davis for all things indigo.