Beech Tree News Network

It’s hard to imagine anything more authentically American than a pair of well-worn blue jeans.  But while the U.S. might’ve popularized the rugged pants, they date back to well before the country’s founding and to the other side of the Atlantic.

Denim likely originated in Europe.  In most historical accounts, blue jeans’ origin story begins in France, specifically the southern city of Nimes, in the 1600’s or earlier.  There, as the legend goes, weavers developed a durable form of fabric known as “serge de Nimes”.  The word “denim”, it’s said, derives from “de Nimes.”  Here, however, the tale gets a little tangled.  For example, serge de Nimes appears to have been woven from wool and silk, while the denim we know today is all or mostly cotton.

“Current research suggests that denim may have, in fact, been an English textile that was given a French name in order to endow it with a certain cachet”, fashion historian and curator Emma McClendon writes in Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2016).  That could make sense, McClendon points out, given the “technological developments in cotton spinning” in England at the time, as well as the “immense reserves of cotton and indigo” available to the country from its colonies in India and the Americas.  Indigo is the plant-based dye that puts blue in blue jeans.  

Wherever the fabric originated, it arrived in the American colonies well before the Revolution of 1776.  The phrase “serge denim breeches” appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper as early as 1723, describing clothing worn by a runaway ship hand.  Levi Strauss, the Bavarian immigrant sometimes credited with introducing denim pants to America, wasn’t even born until 1829.

Strauss does, however, deserve a large share of the credit for blue jeans as we know them today.  In fact, the Levi Strauss & Co. website goes so far as to proclaim him “the inventor of the quintessential American garment.”  Strauss arrived in the U.S. in the late 1840’s to join two of his brothers in wholesome dry goods based in New York City.  “Dry goods” in those days referred to a wide range of wares, but especially to fabric, which appears to have been one of the brothers’ specialties.  In 1853, Strauss left by boat for San Francisco, hoping to cash in on the California Gold Rush that had begun four years earlier by establishing a branch of the family business there.

“It would still be another 20 years before the invention of his popular blue jeans, and Strauss was not the sole inventor.  Half of that honor belongs to Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor who had discovered he could make work pants more durable by adding metal rivets at strategic points.  Wanting to expand production, he approached Strauss, whose business supplied his fabric”, writes Lynn Downey in her 2016 biography Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World. “In 1872, the two men filed a U.S. patent application for “improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” which was granted in 1873.  Blue jeans had not only been born, but patented.

Strauss went into business manufacturing jeans, with Davis serving as factory superintendent, Downey writes.  Around 1906, two years after Strauss’ death, and two years before his own, Davis signed over his rights in the famous patent to Levi Strauss & Co., the business that survived them both and lives on to this day.

Blue jeans sold steadily throughout the early 20th century but were still considered work clothes, not the all-purpose garb they later became.  That began to change with the Great Depression of the 1930’s, according to historian Carolyn Purnell, author of the 2023 book Blue Jeans.  “Prior to the Depression, blue jeans had been firmly working-class garments”, she told History.com in an interview.  “But denim companies quickly realized that workers and farmers struggling to feed their families weren’t in the market for new jeans.  So, they pivoted their attention to middle-class Americans.”

That marketing surprise was aided, Purnell notes, by the popularity of Hollywood Westerns, whose horseback riding heroes often appeared in jeans (even though actual cowboys tended to prefer softer, more comfortable pants).  Jeans’ makers also doubled their potential market by introducing jeans tailored for women, such as Levi Strauss’ Lady Levi’s in 1934.

Jeans got a further boost when later movie stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean made them a symbol of youthful rebellion in movies like The Wild One in 1953 and Rebel Without a Cause in 1955.  That scruffy image, in turn, spurred a backlash against jeans, often enforced through dress codes.  While young people across the U.S. took to wearing jeans wherever they went, “many of their more traditional parents felt that it was inappropriate in polite settings such as school or work”, Purnell says.

Quite a few of those parents eventually gave up on trying to control their kids’ wardrobe choices and even took to wearing jeans themselves, at least on weekends.  In the 1970’s, fashion designers Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt, among others, put denim on the fashion runway, giving the formerly utilitarian garments the sheen of fashion-and price tags to match.  In 1980, Klein amped up blue jeans’ sex appeal further when he controversially featured 15-year-old actress and model Brooke Shields in a provocative TV commercial with the tagline, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

But the white-collar workplace remained largely off-limits.  “That only started to shift around the 1990’s”, Purnell says.  “Once the idea of “Casual Fridays” emerged to raise company morale without boosting paychecks.”  Meanwhile, jeans had become a global phenomenon and a symbol of America’s cultural reach-for better or worse.  According to Statista, today the denim jeans market is worth $75 billion worldwide. (www.history.com)