Ask for It by Name!

If Levi Strauss had stayed home, chances are we’d all be wearing corduroy and that whoosh-whoosh noise would have driven us mad years ago.

Fortunately the inventor of the modern blue jeans, born Loeb Strauss in Bavaria in 1829, was never a man to sit still. Along with his mother and two sisters, Strauss sailed for the new world in 1847 and quickly went to work in his half-brothers’ dry goods business in New York City.

Within a few years, Loeb had changed his first name to Levi, become an American citizen, and set out for San Francisco to bring the family dry goods business to the West Coast, then blossoming as a market in the heady days of the Gold Rush.

For the next twenty years, Levi sold blankets, pillows, clothing and the like all over the western U.S., and gained a reputation for honest goods and business practices. Much of the work clothing he sold was made of denim (from “serge de Nimes,” serge cloth from the town of Nimes in France), a rugged and durable cotton fabric popular among miners. (Denim pants were also known as “jeans,” due to a bit of popular confusion with “jean” cloth, a less durable cotton/wool blend named for Genoa, Italy.)

In 1872, Strauss received a letter from a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis, who explained that he had come up with a way to strengthen the only weak points found in the denim pants he made. By adding metal rivets at stress points such as the pockets, Davis had eliminated the eventual tears that annoyed his customers, and they were ecstatic. Davis wanted to patent his invention, but lacked the funds, and proposed a business partnership with Strauss.

Levi Strauss agreed, and with the new invention and his marketing skills built the business that more than any other convinced Americans to adopt blue jeans as their national uniform.