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How Did Jeans Conquer the World?

The surprising story behind your favorite pants  

iStock/Getty images (top middle); Fotosearch/Getty Images (Levi Strauss); Shutterstock.com (all other photos)

    It was 1849, and Americans were dreaming of gold. A lucky man had found chunks of it sparkling in a California stream. Word was spreading fast.

    All across the country, people left their homes. Farmers dropped their plows in the fields. Preachers closed up their churches. Seamen deserted their ships

    In just a year, nearly 100,000 people traveled west with a single goal: Get rich quick! The gold rush was on.

    But the man who really struck it rich wasn’t a miner looking for gold. He was the man who made the miners’ pants.

A Strong Idea

    Levi Strauss grew up in Germany and arrived in San Francisco in 1853. He was 24 years old. He made money selling clothes and other goods to miners

    In 1873, Strauss got a letter from a tailor named Jacob Davis. Davis’s customers were miners. Their pants took a beating all day. The pockets wore out quickly. All their gold could be lost in a second

    Davis had an idea. He fastened the pockets with metal bolts known as rivetsand the pants were an instant hit. “I cannot make them up fast enough,” he told Strauss. But Davis needed a partner with money to really get the business going

    Strauss agreed right away. He made the pants out of a sturdy cotton called denim. He dyed them blue so they wouldn’t show the dirt. And pretty soon, workers all over the West were wearing Levi’swaist overalls.”

Jeans in Every Closet

    It took decades for Levi’s pants to make it to your closet. At first, they were seen only as work clothes. But in the 1930s, Western movies became popular. Suddenly cowboys were cool. And cowboys wore jeansat least in the movies.

    In the 1950s, Hollywood gave jeans a bad reputation. Movies came out about motorcycle gangs and violence in schools. All the young troublemakers wore the same clothes: jeans and leather jackets. Before long, schools started banning denim pants.

    In the end, it didn’t matter. Teens liked wearing clothes their parents hated. In 1958, one article said that 90 percent of young people owned jeans. And they wore them almost everywhere

    Today, the average American owns seven pairs of jeans. And the company that started it all is doing pretty well. Levi’s sells nearly $5 billion worth of clothes a year. Now that’s a gold rush

Sarin Images/The Granger Collection (gold miner); Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images (James Dean)

Blue jeans were invented as sturdy work pants for gold miners (left). But movie stars like James Dean turned them into a fashion trend. 

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