Jeans

Since the 1960s, jeans have been identified with a wide array of roles in consumption practices, in articulations of popular cultures as well as in social theory and research. In fact, as a garment, jeans invite different forms of reflection when discussed as a nineteenth-century work outfit, as a stylization motif of American middle-class lifestyle, as a cold war counterculture outfit, as a high fashion item, or as an ubiquitous and complex manifestation of twenty-first-century global consumption. Indeed, few types of garments compare with jeans as an everyday outfit of such an intense global use.

The materialization of jeans as a distinct garment and product can be mainly associated with Levi (originally Löb) Strauss, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria. Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1853 and founded a dry-goods wholesale company supplying gold rush miners with tents, blankets, and other textile products. Information regarding the early years of the Levi Strauss & Co (LS&CO) is scarce, mainly because the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed its headquarters. This, together with the intense marketing of the origins of the Levi brand, make the inquiry into the “birth of jeans” an arduous task. The generic term jeans was not used until the twentieth century despite evidence that eighteenth-century Americans wore work trousers and bib overalls made from denim. In the 1850s to 1860s, LS&CO supplied general stores with work pants made of canvas, and subsequently of denim, but did not brand them as LS&CO products. It was not branded until 1873 when Jacob W. Davis, a Reno tailor and entrepeneur, established a business connection with LS&CO, and they jointly registered a patent titled “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.” These denim work pants, at that time called waist overalls, with patented riveted fasteners became the basis of the subsequent branded Levi's jeans, although it was not until 1960 that the term jeans was used in LS&CO's advertising. When the riveted “pants of Levi's” appeared on the market in the West Coast, they had to compete with other branded denim overalls, such as Can't Bust ‘Em. In the 1870s to 1880s, the retailing industry in the United States grew in terms of size and complexity, necessitating companies to consciously build consumer loyalty with the help of brands and marketing. Thus, LS&CO marked its textile products with copper rivets (exclusively until 1890), the two-horse brand (after 1886), the Levi's trademark (1928), the red tab (1936), or the winglike arches of double orange stitching on the back pocket (registered only in 1943). In addition, many work-wear apparel manufacturers extended their product line to such items as male office dress, pants, and coats (LS&CO), children's playwear (OshKosh B'Gosh) or women's work apparel (H.D. Lee).

Jeans have been made predominantly of denim, a heavy, 9- to 13-ounce cotton twill with a characteristic diagonal and bicolor, mostly blue-white, ribbing. The term denim is derived from serge de Nîmes, once a generic name for a wool-silk blend twill whereas denim from the mid-nineteenth century refers mostly to a heavy, pure cotton fabric. The term jeans as a generic term for a cotton-made fabric dates back to sixteenth-century Genoa, whose looms supplied western Europe with a coarse textile of blue dye called Gênes. Jeans, however, as a generic name for denim pants came into use in the 1930s in the United States. The blue dye of jeans and denim was originally natural indigo, though after the early 1900s, a chemically manufactured blue dye was used. Today, India, Brazil, China, and Turkey are major denim-producing countries.

...