The riveted jean was a Reno tailor's idea, patented with Levi's money
Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, had a customer who kept tearing his trousers. Davis hammered copper rivets into the stress points, but he could not afford a patent. So he wrote to his cloth supplier, Levi Strauss, offering a partnership. Their 1873 patent created the blue jean, and nobody now knows why its famous lot number is 501.
Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant, had moved to San Francisco in 1853 to open a western branch of his brothers' dry-goods firm, selling fabric wholesale to tailors like Davis. The rivet patent expired in 1890, the same year the company began numbering its products and gave the copper-riveted waist overalls the number 501. Any explanation for that choice was lost when the 1906 earthquake destroyed the company's records.
For decades these were work clothes for cowboys, lumberjacks and railway crews in the West. Easterners discovered them during the dude-ranch holidays of the 1930s, carrying tales and trousers home. In the Second World War jeans were declared essential and sold only to defence workers. The design people like to call unchanged was actually altered repeatedly: wartime metal rules removed the crotch rivet and waist cinch, and back-pocket rivets, first hidden under denim to stop them scratching furniture, were eventually dropped because they wore through anyway. Greasers, mods and hippies later adopted the jeans, and Albert Einstein's Levi's leather jacket sold at auction in 2016 for £110,500.
The company guards its identity fiercely. The double-arc stitching on the back pockets has been used since 1873 and trademarked in over 100 jurisdictions, and in the six years from 2001 Levi's filed nearly 100 lawsuits, more than anyone else in apparel. Manufacturing history has been rockier. The 1990 closure of a San Antonio plant sent 1,150 sewing jobs to Costa Rica and sparked protests, and a 1991 scandal revealed some jeans labelled Made in the USA had been sewn by Chinese workers in the Northern Mariana Islands under conditions officials called slave-like. By the end of 2003 its last American factory had closed.
Descendants of Strauss's four nephews controlled the firm for generations. It finally listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2019, valued at 6.6 billion dollars.
Source: Levi Strauss & Co.
