Blue Jeans

Blue jeans are perhaps the most popular kind of clothing in the world. They are a part of everyday life and people of all ages and genders wear them. They are accepted as a part of modern day clothing but it hasn’t always been like this because they were workers’ clothes at first. We are all thankful to Levi Strauss, the inventor of blue jeans. 

Levi Strauss was born in Germany in 1829 but when his father died in 1846, he and his sister moved to New York. He moved to San Francisco during the Gold Rush in 1853 but couldn’t work as a miner, so he started to work as a tailor and sold canvas to miners. Miners used the canvas to make tents. 

One day a miner came up to Levi and told him that he couldn’t find strong enough trousers to work in the mine. Levi decided to sew trousers from canvas. After a short time, he had sold all of the trousers that he had made. However, there was a problem; canvas was heavy and he needed lighter fabric. He found a type of fabric named serge de Nimes in France. It was perfect for making jeans. Over time, Americans shortened the name of the fabric to denim. The other problem was that the colour of denim was white and it got dirty very quickly so Levi had to dye the fabric. This is how blue jeans came about.

Levi’s jeans became so popular that the company grew very fast and inspired other companies to make blue jeans. Today many different jean factories and world famous trademarks make jeans but none of them are as popular as Levi’s and I guess they never will be.

Adapted from linguapress.com