A SHORT HISTORY OF DENIM - Fashion

Twenty years after this was written, the magazine American Fabrics ran an article which stated,“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.” So how did this utilitarian and unpretentious fabricbecome the stuff of legends that it is today? And how did pants made out of denim come to becalled jeans, when they were not made out of the fabric called jean? One very important reasoncan be found in the life and work of a Bavarian-born businessman who made his way to GoldRush San Francisco more than 150 years ago – Levi Strauss.Levi Strauss was a wholesale dry goods merchant beginning with his arrival in San Francisco in1853. He sold the common dry goods products, including clothing whose manufacturers areunfortunately unknown to us. Levi worked hard, and acquired a reputation for quality productsover the next two decades. In 1872 he got a letter from tailor Jacob Davis, who had been makingriveted clothing for the miners in the Reno area and who purchased cloth from Levi Strauss & Co.He needed a business partner to help him get a patent and begin to manufacture this new type ofwork clothing. Well, Levi knew a good business opportunity when he saw one, and in 1873LS&CO. and Davis received a patent for an “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings.”As soon as the two men got their manufacturing facility under way, they began to make copperriveted “waist overalls” (which is the old name for jeans). The denim for the first waist overallscame from the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire, on the EastCoast of the United States. This area, known as New England, was the site of the first Americantextile mills, and by 1873 their fabrics were well-known and well-made. The Amoskeag mill itselfdated to 1804, and their denim production dated to the mid-1860s (this being the time of theAmerican Civil War, the company also manufactured guns for a few years).In 1914 an article about the association between LS&CO. and Amoskeag appeared in the mill’sown newspaper. It read in part, “In spite of the many cheaper grades offered in competition, thesale of the Amoskeag denim garment has kept up due in part to the superior denim used in itsconstruction and in part to superior workmanship such as sewing with linen thread, etc. Doubtless