The History of Denim and How Jeans Were Created

During the days of the California Gold Rush, a local miner’s wife faced a problem.

Her husband’s denim work pants kept ripping, so his tailor, Jacob Davis, came up with the idea of ​​adding copper rivets to key stress points, like the pocket corners and the base of the button fly, to keep them from ripping.

Davis’s “riveted pants” quickly became a smash hit and, unbeknownst to him at the time, marked the official birth of blue jeans, a garment that would transform fashion and represent the United States around the world.

“It really democratized American fashion and it’s also the biggest export we’ve sent around the world, because people identify jeans specifically with American Western culture,” said Shawn Grain Carter, a fashion professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “It doesn’t matter what your economic or social class is. It doesn’t matter what your views are in terms of the political spectrum. Everyone wears denim.”

These days, denim is a major sales driver for retailers large and small, as the global denim market reached $101 billion this year, up 28% from 2020, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor International. Major clothing companies American Eagle has Levi Strauss are in a race to corner this market, relying on A-list celebrities like Sydney Sweeney and Beyoncé to win over buyers and boost sales in a volatile economy.

But without Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous jeans company, Davis’ invention might not have made it past the railroad town where it was created in the early 1870s.

Shortly after Davis created his riveted pants, called at the time “waisted overalls” or “dungarees,” they began selling like “hot cakes” and he needed a business partner to obtain a patent, said Tracey Panek, Levi’s in-house historian. So he wrote to Strauss, a Bavarian-born immigrant who ran a successful wholesale business in San Francisco and who had supplied Davis with the denim he used to create his riveted pants.

“The secret to these Pents is the Rivits that I have put in these pockets and I have found the demand so great that I cannot get them back fast enough,” Davis wrote to Strauss in a letter, according to PBS.

Strauss, a “savvy” businessman, recognized the opportunity and agreed to partner with Davis, Panek said.

“This would have been the first time Levi” made its own products, Panek said. “He was no longer just importing and selling other people’s products. He was manufacturing himself and selling to retailers.”

On May 20, 1873, the two men obtained a patent for the riveted pants and eventually opened a factory on Fremont Street, near what is now the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco’s financial district.

They promise to offer workers the toughest jeans on the market and soon, business is booming.

Thanks to Strauss’ connections as a wholesaler, the company’s riveted coveralls quickly spread across the United States, becoming the clothing of choice for workers around the world: miners, cowboys, farmers – for any role requiring durable clothing.

At the time, jeans were exclusively for work, but as emerging denim manufacturers competed for a similar customer base, they looked to expand their assortment to boost sales.

“Slowly and steadily over the course of the 20th century, you start to see some of these manufacturers making variations,” said Sonya Abrego, a New York-based fashion historian. “There was this style called spring pants that were more fitted, dressier, slightly flared, maybe what the factory foreman would wear, right? As opposed to the guy on the shop floor.”

In 1934, Levi created the very first line of women’s jeans. Around this time, denim began to become more popular outside of work, primarily for activities like ranch vacations, camping, and horseback riding.

“So they were kind of taking a cowboy outfit or a worker’s outfit, but wearing it in a resort setting,” Abrego said.

Guys’ ranch vacations had become popular because there were finally highways connecting different parts of the country, and few were willing to venture into Europe during a war. Companies like Levi began releasing ads promoting their jeans as “ranch dudes” and “authentic western riding wear” to attract shoppers looking for jeans to take with them on vacation, according to archival ads from the era.

These cultural moments helped expand denim beyond working people, but jeans didn’t become widespread casual wear until after World War II, when American fashion began to change as a whole.

By the end of World War II, the powerful American consumer was beginning to emerge. For years, Americans were forced to ration common goods like rubber, sugar, and meat, while being encouraged to save their money by buying war bonds and saving their cash.

When the country transitioned from wartime to peacetime, Americans were ready to splurge and quickly began spending big on new cars, appliances, and clothing.

“With a little more money to spend, you start to see a bigger push for casual wear, fun clothes and play clothes, clothes to wear to backyard barbecues,” Abrego said. “Clothes that today we would consider casual.”

Slowly and surely, it became more and more acceptable for men and women to wear jeans outside of the work setting. Then denim manufacturers lobbied to allow jeans in schools.

“They wanted to sell to as many people as possible,” Abrego said. “The idea that jeans are good for school means they are good for everyday.”

By the early 1960s, denim manufacturers had expanded their product lines and were selling a wide variety of colors, cuts and styles. He became a symbol of the hippie movement and a mainstay on Hollywood film sets.

Soon, denim was everywhere, and the 1970s brought the iconic bell-bottom pants and the first iteration of “designer jeans”—denim pants produced by labels and brands whose designs had nothing to do with workwear or Western wear, like Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt.

Since then, denim has remained a constant in global fashion. Even though silhouettes, washes and fits have changed over time, jeans never really go out of style, which is what makes them so durable, Abrego said.

“This is a drawing from 1873… do we see anything else from 1873 on the street? It’s kind of crazy if you think about it that way,” Abrego said. “We can talk about all the details, all the changes in manufacturing and all the different cuts and finishes, but it’s one recognizable thing, it’s still a pair of jeans. To me, as a historian, that continuity is so compelling because I can’t really name anything else that has remained the same to this degree.”