Blue Jeans, the All-American Fashion

In 1996, someone found some very old clothes in an old mine in Nevada, the USA. They included a pair of dirty old jeans. Today, those jeans are very valuable, and they are now in the Levi Strauss Archival Collection in San Francisco. The jeans, which are over 120 years old, are the oldest pair of Levi’s 501 jeans in the world. They are almost the same as a modern 501 pair; there are just some small differences in the detail. Today’s 501s have two back pockets while the old pair has one.

Jeans were the classic clothes of the American West. In 1853, Levi Strauss, who was a young tailor from Germany, began working in San Francisco. Levi sold thick canvas to miners and the miners used the canvas to make tents.

One day, a miner told Levi that he could not find trousers that were strong enough for work in the gold mines. Levi decided to make some trousers out of canvas. Very soon, he had sold all the canvas trousers he had made! They were just what miners wanted.

However, the canvas was rather heavy and stiff. Levi, therefore, began to look for a different textile, and soon he found a heavy textile from France. It was called ‘serge de Nimes’. Americans just called this ‘de Nimes’, and this name soon got reduced to ‘denim’. Denim was a bit lighter than canvas, but it was very strong and ideal for miners.

The only problem was that the original denim was almost white, and miners did not like the colour. Their denim trousers got dirty as soon as they began working. Levi Strauss, therefore, decided to use coloured denim, and he chose dark blue. This was a radical new idea; blue jeans had arrived!

Levi’s jeans were so popular that his company got bigger and bigger. Soon, other firms were making blue jeans, too. Miners liked them, and so did cowboys and other working men. Blue jeans became classic American working trousers.

After the Second World War, jeans became popular all over the world. Today, blue jeans are made mostly in Asia because of the lower production cost. However, it is still possible to buy blue jeans that are made in San Francisco, if you have a lot of money to spend, of course.