“Waist overalls” evolved from tough overgarments to save miners’ clothes to into durable, fashionable workwear for all
Blue jeans have long been a favourite of ranchers, farmers and miners who need tough clothing to withstand long days of active wear.
Today, jeans are everywhere and are worn for a lot more than work.
The journey to success for jeans began with two men with very different stories. One had business savvy. The other had a stroke of luck. It takes both to succeed in business.
Levi Strauss (1829-1902) grew up in Germany, a Jew living in a country unfriendly to Jews at the time. His older brothers already had a thriving dry goods business in the United States, so he emigrated to New York to help.
He had a good head for growing a business and his brothers appreciated his ideas. When he heard about the onset of the gold rush in California, he saw a chance to start an operation in San Francisco. The plan wasn’t to pan for gold but to set up his own dry goods business supplying needed fabric-related goods to the people swarming into the area.
Levi Strauss and Co. began in 1852 at the height of the California gold rush. Everyone needs sheets, towels and fabric for clothing wherever they live, and Levi’s business prospered because of the influx of immigrants and Americans from other parts of the country. His brothers’ business in New York supplied his products, sent by steamship.
In return, he sent them payments in gold. The gold rush provided lots of it. He sent them whatever the prospectors paid him: gold dust, ingots, and bars. One of his shipments amounted to more than $80,000. The Panama Canal hadn’t been built yet and the steamships took six months to travel around Cape Horn, Chile.
One of the ships carrying his gold, the S.S. Central America, sank in a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina in September 1857, resulting in the tragic loss of 425 lives and great financial losses in gold for many businesses. Strauss lost an estimated $76,000. The ship was recovered in 1988, revealing a time capsule of everyday life back then, as well as the gold.
One of Strauss’s corporate customers was a tailor named Jacob Davis. In the 1800s, there were no big clothing factories. All clothing and other fabric products were made locally by tailors.
Jacob Davis had his own tailor business in Reno, Nevada. He’d tried several businesses and moved to many places in North America but always reverted to tailoring. He’d lost a lot of money investing in businesses that failed. Like the prospectors for which he made work clothes, he searched for his own success that would fulfil his dreams. As sometimes happens, a lucky sequence of events led him to that realization.
One of his customers was a big, hardworking man. As the story goes, this man had actually worn out all his pants and had nothing left to wear. I can imagine him bending over to pick up a tool he’d dropped and his thread-bare pants finally giving up.
The man’s wife came into Davis’s shop to order new pants. Davis recorded in his diary that he’d need the man to come into his store so he could get his measurements. The woman then said her husband was waiting at home and couldn’t come in because he had no pants left to wear.
She complained that he often ripped his pants at the pockets, a high stress point. She asked Davis to make the strongest pants possible and paid him the premium price of $3 in advance. The measurements were obtained and Davis set to work.
Before she’d entered his shop, Davis had been making horse blankets. The copper rivets used to attach straps to the blankets still lay on his workbench. Those rivets gave him the innovation he needed. He made the pants with rivets at the corners of the pockets to strengthen them. The innovation became so successful that other men (or their wives) soon asked him for pants made with the copper rivets at the pockets.
Davis saw an opportunity but he had a family of six children and a wife who begged him not to invest in another of his harebrained schemes in case he lost his investment again. He knew he had something worthwhile so he contacted someone he could trust, someone with business savvy, someone with the money to pay for a patent. He contacted Levi Strauss, his fabric supplier. He explained his rivetted pockets idea, described the growing demand and mentioned he charged $3 a pair. He suggested they buy a patent together.
Strauss went for it. He invited Davis to come to San Francisco to manage production, who convinced his wife to move one more time. He and Strauss took out a patent for the rivetted pants on May 20, 1873. Davis managed their new rivetted pants business while Strauss managed his own dry goods business and the marketing of both.
They were called “waist overalls”, a strange name today, but in the mines of the 19th century, men put them on over their other pants to protect them from ripping and to keep them clean. At the end of their shift, workers would hang their waist overalls on a hook in the mine’s mudroom before going home for the day. They looked like ordinary oversize pants, covering from waist to ankle.
They were made either of denim or a tough, canvas-like fabric called duck cloth, or just duck. Duck was often white and in many vintage photos, workmen are shown wearing white pants. They didn’t stay white of course, but the strength of the fabric was preferred for jobs involving physical labour. Duck was also used on covered wagons, needed then by homesteaders moving across the country. It was the tiny pieces of copper — the rivets and not gold — that made Strauss and Davis their fortune.
They were called overalls until the 1960s when baby boomers started calling them jeans.
The number of the first jeans was 501 on the order sheet. That number was printed on the label and soon customers were asking for a pair of 501s, the iconic style representing durability.
A pair of waist overalls was found 100 years after the gold rush in an abandoned mine, apparently in good enough condition to be worn. No one dared wear them, however. Their value as an original Levi Strauss product made them worth more than the gold the original owner worked so hard to find.
Initially, the pants were sewn by women at home but eventually, high demand called for a large facility. The women had to bring their own machines to work, and the type of machine sturdy enough to sew the heavy material was listed in the want ads for hire.
Patents in the U.S. expire after 17 years and as that day approached for Strauss and Davis, they knew they’d need something distinctive to set their product apart from copycats. They designed a label that anyone could identify. The picture showed two horses trying to pull a pair of pants apart, obviously in a futile attempt, giving the message that this product was tough.
Later, the company modernized the logo with a batwing design reflecting the curved stitching on the rear pocket, but always kept the eye-catching red.
Around 1907, Jacob Davis sold his share in the patent and production for Levi Strauss and Co. but remained head of the factories until his death. Levi Strauss never married and lived with his family, including his siblings, their partners and children in one big house for the rest of his life in San Francisco. The entire family also worked together in Levi’s business. Today, the company remains family owned.
As western movies became popular, so did the styles depicted in them. John Wayne starred in the 1939 movie Stagecoach wearing Levi jeans and made them famous.
Even before that, the idea of women wearing jeans for outdoor work instead of dresses took hold, and in 1934 Levi introduced Lady Levis, the 701s designed for women.
In the 1950s, Hollywood stars like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe were also influential in bringing Levi jeans to the mainstream.
The term dungarees originated from India in the 17th century from the Hindi term dungri. The word “denim” comes from a twill fabric called “serge de Nîmes”, first woven in Nîmes, France.
People have dyed their clothes the distinctive indigo blue colour for millennia, a dye obtained from plants native to the tropics, notably the Indian subcontinent.
The term jeans comes from a twilled cotton fabric called ‘Genoa fustian’ in Italy; often used to make durable workwear. Labourers in the U.S. often referred to their workwear as jeans, after the city of Genoa where the fabric was initially woven.
No one can claim to have invented jeans but the Levi and Strauss Co. introduced the innovation of the copper rivets. The transition from practical workwear, to casual wear, to iconic brand and trendy fashion was never far behind.
