A Crash Course in Jeans

Ever since I started wearing jeans, I’ve had questions that go beyond the typical “why are they so uncomfortable?” and “when will skinny jeans finally go out of style?” I wanted to know the minutia: why do they have rivets? Why is blue the default color? Why have jeans been the gold standard of pants since the Gold Rush? Why haven’t they undergone major alterations since the 19th century, and why are they still so popular today? As it turns out, jeans have a storied—and somewhat mythologized—history.

The denim jeans we know and love (or hate, depending) were patented in the 1800s by businessman Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis, but the materials for producing them have been around much longer. According to Levi Strauss & Co., denim is an English derivative of similar European fabrics: the French fabric “serge de Nîmes” and the Genoese fabric known simply as “jean” were composed of silk and wool, and both were imported into England by the end of the 17th century. (The word “denim” is thought to be a contraction of serge de Nîmes.) Denim is woven entirely of cotton, which makes it stronger and more durable than its counterparts.

Denim and jean fabrics were produced in American textile mills as early as the late 1700s—self-producing cloth was another step towards independence from England—and George Washington himself supposedly toured a Massachusetts mill that wove denim and jean in 1789. These two fabrics were used for disparate purposes in 1800s America: jean was primarily used for “finer” clothing such as topcoats or vests, while denim was mainly used as workwear due to its durability and comfort (a debatable aspect, many would argue).

It was the late 19th century when Levi Strauss burst onto the jean-scene, although his given name was actually “Loeb” Strauss. He was born in Bavaria in 1829, and left Germany with his family in 1848. After arriving in New York, Strauss went to work for his half-brothers who sold wholesale dry goods including cloth, linens, and clothing. In 1853, the same year he obtained his citizenship, Strauss set off for San Francisco, where the Gold Rush was in full swing.

Gold was first discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848. In just one year, the city’s population rose to 25,000 from the influx of miners seeking their fortune. The true story of denim jeans’ origins is somewhat obscured: Levi Strauss and & Co. lost many of its historical records in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, including records of Levi Strauss himself. The popular story is that Strauss, after noticing miners’ need for sturdier clothing, had a tailor make a pair of brown canvas pants which he then dyed blue.

The brown canvas story is a myth, according to Levi’s: Strauss actually received a letter from Jacob Davis, a tailor who purchased Strauss’ cloth and made riveted clothing for miners in Reno. In his letter, Davis wrote: “The secret of them Pents is the Rivits that I put in those Pockets and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them up fast enough.” Davis needed a business partner in order to acquire a patent for his jeans. In 1873, he and Strauss—now Levi Strauss & Co.—got a patent for an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Opening.”

The first jeans they produced were referred to as “waist overalls,” and were not made of canvas, but rather fashioned out of indigo-dyed denim. Their denim was originally sourced from textile mills across the nation, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Thousands of miners, lumberjacks, and farmers in San Francisco were wearing denim jeans by the end of Levi’s first year in business.

Denim jeans weren’t restricted to the realm of work clothing for long, however. Levi’s, along with brands such as Lee and Wrangler, began producing a wider range of jeans for people who wished to wear them outside the workplace. Jeans’ rise to popularity was largely fueled by nostalgia and a yearning for Americana. Around the time the Wild West aesthetic became popular among wealthy Americans who vacationed at dude ranches, so too did the denim jeans of ranch hands. Westerns were the most popular film genre from the 1930s through the ‘50s, which prompted parents to dress their children in cowboy outfits; this naturally included jeans. In 1934, jeans meant specifically for women, “Lady Levi’s,” were produced for the first time.

Movies such as The Wild One first associated denim with rebelliousness, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that jeans played a role in real-world rebellion. During the civil rights movement, jeans were worn by activists both as a practical clothing choice and to send a message about racial caste and poverty. Art historian Caroline A. Jones wrote: “It took Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington to make [jeans] popular…It was here that civil rights activists were photographed wearing the poor sharecropper’s blue denim overalls to dramatize how little had been accomplished since Reconstruction.”

Some of the most iconic styles of jeans emerged in the 1970s, when hippies began wearing bell-bottoms and “hip huggers” during the disco craze. This was also the decade when most brands that produced jeans began to diversify, selling shirts, corduroys, and slacks. The 1980s was a decade for “designer” jeans from brands like Sergio Valente and Calvin Klein; the 1990s introduced oversized or “baggy” jeans, which were well-loved in hip-hop circles.

To people of my generation, it may seem like skinny jeans were a dark byproduct of the 2010s, but they have plagued the world in previous decades. In the 1950s, a type of skinny jeans called “cigarette jeans” became popular among stars like Elvis Presley and James Dean as a rebuttal to the wide-legged pants of the disco craze. Stretch fabrics were introduced in the ‘80s, which made skinny jeans more comfortable (in theory). In the 2010s, skinny jeans were most closely associated with the hipster aesthetic, but the 2020 pandemic reminded us how important comfortable, wide-legged pants are; fortunately, baggy jeans remain the status quo in 2025. “If we were to use a human term to describe a textile we might say that denim is an honest fabric—substantial, forthright, and unpretentious,” read a 1962 article in the magazine American Fabrics. Indeed, jeans have never shaken their original purpose as a clothing item designed for everyday use by everyday people, and perhaps this is why they’ve aged so well: because they’re the most reliable item in your wardrobe. Wear them to work, to protests, to the disco, and try to remember their reliability when the waistline inevitably pinches and the pockets are inevitably a bit small.