THE JEANING OF AMERICA—AND THE WORLD
by Carin C. Quinn
This is the story of a sturdy American symbol which has now-spread throughout
most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple
pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de
Tocqueville called “a manly and legitimate passion for equality. …” Blue jeans are
favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys; bankers and deadbeats; fashion
designers and beer drinkers. They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes; they
are merely American. Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world—
including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teen-aged gang that was selling
them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair. They have been around for a
long time, and it seems likely that they will outlive even the necktie.
This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew . . . in
the 1850’s. His name was Levi Strauss.
He was born in Bad Ocheim, Germany, in 1829, and during the European
political turmoil of 1848 decided to take his chances in New York, to which his two
brothers already had emigrated. Upon arrival. Levi soon found that his two brothers had
exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land of the main chance. They were
landowners, they had told him; instead, he found them pushing needles, thread, pots,
pans, ribbons, yarn, scissors, and buttons to housewives. For two years he was a lowly
peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door-to-door to eke out a marginal living.
When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in 1850, he jumped
at the opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.
It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner
down from the mother lode, he learned that pants—sturdy pants that would stand up to
the rigors of the diggings—were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned. On
the spot, Strauss measured the man’s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for
six dollars in gold dust, had them tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. The miner
was delighted with the result, word got around about “those pants of Levi’s,” and
Strauss was in business. The company has been in business ever since.
When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He
received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nîmes, France—called serge de
Nîmes and swiftly shortened to “denim” (the word “jeans” derives from Gênes, the
French word for Genoa, where a similar cloth was produced). Almost from the first,
Stauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name, but it
was not until the 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become
a company trademark. The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada, tailor, Jacob
W. Davis, who added them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Alkali Ike. Alkali, the
story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them
with ore samples and demanded that Davis do something about it. As a kind of joke,
Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted; once again, the idea
worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the
gimmick—and hired Davis as a regional manager.
By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the
company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the
company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a
man of prominence in California. For three decades thereafter the business remained
profitable though small, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West—
cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi’s jeans were first introduced
to the East, apparently, during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930’s, when vacationing
Easterners returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with rivets. Another
boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity
and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. From a company with fifteen
salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the
organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two
thousand, with fifty plants and offices in thirty-five countries. Each year, more than
250,000,000 items of Levi’s clothing are sold—including more than 83,000,000 pairs of
riveted blue jeans. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and
demonstrable reliability, the common pants of America. They can be purchased prewashed, pre-faded, and pre-shrunk for the suitably proletarian look. They adapt
themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert
them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something
to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.
The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of
their own—so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco.
There was, for example, the turn-of-the-century trainman who replaced a faulty coupling
with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul his car
out of a ditch; the Californian who found several pairs in an abandoned mine, wore
them, then discovered they were sixty-three years old and still as good as new and
turned them over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to their toughness. And then there is
the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two
stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi’s belt loop through which
his rope was hooked.
Today “those pants of Levi’s” have gone across the seas—although the company
has learned that marketing abroad is an arcane art. The conservative-dress jeans
favored in northern France do not move on the Côte d’Azur; Sta-Prest sells well in
Switzerland but dies in Scandinavia; button fronts are popular in France, zippers in
Britain.
Though Levi Strauss & Co. has since become Levi Strauss International, with all
that the corporate name implies, it still retains a suitably fond regard for its beginnings.
Through what it calls its “Western Image Program,” employing Western magazine
advertisements, local radio and television, and the promotion of rodeos, the company
still pursues the working people of the West who first inspired Levi Strauss to make
pants to fit the world.
Carin C. Quinn received her master’s degree in American studies from California State
University at Los Angeles in 1976; she now attends Neiv York University.