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A Very Brief History of Levi Jeans
Other | Wednesday 12th March 2014 | Sukaina
What is the back-story of arguably the greatest clothing item ever invented?
The story of Levi begun in San Francisco in 1853, when a young German named Levi Strauss moved to California to work in the dry goods business on Sacramento Street. However, the idea for jeans spurred from the story of a very different man; Jacob Davis. As a tailor, he noticed that a certain customer kept buying cloth to reinforce his work trousers. This provided Davis with the perfect inspiration for the invention of jeans. Unlike work trousers, jeans would be inserted with copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain.
It was at this point that Levi Strauss became vital to the evolutionary story of jeans. Davis approached him and suggested that they collaborate in order to get funding for their new revolutionary project. The manufacturing began in the 1870s and after experimentation and modification the company began producing their first Levis 501 Jeans in the 1890s, a style that went on to become the world's best-selling item of clothing to date.
The name of Levi then cropped up again, over one hundred years later, in the 1930’s when men who had been travelling in Eastern America returned home with stories of ‘hard-wearing pants’. Jeans also became an item to be coveted during World War II where only people engaged in defence work could buy them. During the 20th century the company exploded on the market and moved from having a mere 15 man sales team to a force of 22,000. With a little publicity assistance from the likes of James Dean and Elvis Presley, this growing force is still going strong today.
