Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A History of Blue Jeans

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Unquestionably, the most popular clothing innovation of the last 150 years has been blue jeans. They can be found all over the world, yet they have become synonymous with American culture. While the modern blue jeans are definitely American, their origin actually goes back centuries earlier to Europe. Learn more about the history of blue jeans and how they became so popular on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unquestionably, the most popular clothing innovation in the last 150 years has been blue jeans. They can be found all over the world, yet they've become synonymous with American culture. While the blue jeans are definitely American, their origin actually goes back centuries to Europe. Learn more about the history of blue jeans and how they became so popular on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the, parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. If you're interested in fashion but you don't know where to start, Skillshare can help you learn the skills you need to get started. They have videos on fashion design, starting a fashion label, drawing sketches, and fashion photography. They also have numerous videos on sewing that cover everything from learning how to sew to advance projects.

With Skillshare Premium, you can have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes. Once again, that's everything-everywhere.com slash Skillshare. There's a good chance that most of you listening to this right now, regardless of where you live on earth, own a pair of blue jeans. That's because blue jeans have become one of the most ubiquitous types of clothing in the world. The story of blue jeans doesn't actually start in the United States. It starts with a cloth used to make jeans, denim.

In the 15th century, a heavy cloth that came from Genoa, Italy, was known as gene cloth. Gene cloth was a cotton-heavy fabric sometimes woven with wool in addition as well. It was developed for sailors to wear wet or dry, and it was also used for sales. The word gene comes from the French word for Genoa, Jens. The Genoese would import a blue dye in the form of indigo from India and used it to dye their cloth. The French called it Blue de Jens. So, yeah, blue jeans actually refers to a particular cloth even before it was ever used as a name for the pants. On a related note, the Genoese may have gotten the idea for gene cloth from India.

The Indians had a heavy cloth known as Dungary, which was a Hindi word. Dungary was traded with Europe via Britain and was used for heavy pants. Today, Dungare is used to describe an overall made of blue denim. Denham was developed in the city of Neme, France. The development was nothing more than an attempt to copy the popular cotton twill cloth that was created in Genoa. Denham gets its name from Dene, which just means from Niem in French. Jean and denim cloth was a popular cheap cloth for working people in Europe,

and there are 17th and 18th century paintings of people wearing what looks like blue jeans. In reality, they were wearing pants of a similar color and a similar cloth. Blue jeans, as we know them today, aren't just blue pants made out of denim, however. They are something more specific. This is where we introduce the pivotal person in the story of blue jeans, Levi Strauss. Strauss was born in Germany in 1820. and migrated to the United States in 1847 at the age of 18. His two older brothers had already moved to New York and had started a wholesaling company,

known as Jay Strauss's brother and company. Levi worked for his brothers, eventually moving to Kentucky to represent the company, until they decided to send him to California. In 1854, he opened his own wholesale business in San Francisco, known as Levi Strauss and Company. In San Francisco, he had a customer who purchased goods from him named Jacob Davis, who was a tailor. Davis lived in Reno, Nevada, and created clothing and tents made from heavy denim cloth. One day, a woman came to Davis and asked him to create a pair of pants for her husband

that didn't easily fall apart and could be used for heavy work. Davis took the step, which made modern blue jeans. He added rivets to the seams in the places that were most likely to fall apart, in particular in the bottom of the fly and in the corners of the pockets. In 1872, Jacob Davis made a proposal to Levi Strauss to manufacture his pants, to which Strauss agreed. In 1873, the pair received U.S. patent number 139,121, an improvement in fastening pocket openings. The first pants created by Levi Strauss and company had two front pockets and one back pocket. The smaller pocket inside the front right pocket was added a few years later and was designed for pocket watches. Levi Strauss eventually shifted the business to focus exclusively on the production

of blue jeans. There were early blue jeans made for women as well. The biggest difference was that the men's jeans had a fly in the front, and the women's jeans had buttons down the left side. In 1901, Levi Strauss introduced their 501 line of jeans, which added a second back pocket and created the style we have today. In fact, the Levi's 501 is still in production. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake leveled the Levi Strauss headquarters and destroyed almost all of the corporate history and early versions of the product. For the first half of the 20th century, blue jeans were a very utilitarian form of clothing. They were mostly worn by workers and farmers. They weren't cool, and they weren't really considered fashionable. If you wore blue jeans,

you might have been considered a hick or a rube. The status of blue jeans really started to change in the 1950s. In particular, their depiction in film changed the cultural perception of jeans. Marlon Brando wore jeans as the rebellious biker in the 1953 movie The Wild One, and more importantly, James Dean wore them in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause. Marilyn Monroe also wore them in her 1952 film Clash by Night and in her final film The Misfits in 1961. Waring blue jeans became a sign of rebellion amongst youth. Some establishments in the 1950s like theaters and restaurants actually banned customers who wore blue jeans for this reason. In particular, they became an obsession in the Soviet Union.

It's believed to have started with the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students, which was held in Moscow. Young Soviets were exposed to Western culture in a way they never had before, a black market soon developed in blue jeans that lasted until the end of the Cold War. French philosopher Reggie Debray noted, quote, there is more power in rock music and blue jeans than in the entire Red Army, unquote. Originally, the Soviets encouraged and produced blue jeans. jeans as they were considered clothing for workers, but they soured on it as it became a symbol of Western decadence and subversion. In 1961, Ian Timovich Rochatov and Vladislav Petrovv Pavich Vavashenko

were actually executed after a show trial for trafficking in black market jeans. The blue jeans brand, Rokotov and Feinberg, is named after them. In 1979, the Soviets finally gave in and started manufacturing blue jeans, but by that time it was too late. In the 1960s, jeans were adopted by the counterculture movement as they became a symbol of American culture overseas. The Beatles and Rolling Stones wore blue jeans and by that point they truly became ubiquitous in American culture. Even though I'm well aware, both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were British. In the 1970s, faded and distressed jeans became a fashion rage and presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were regularly seen wearing blue jeans, which was a first for American

leaders. Perhaps the high point of blue jeans, becoming an iconic American symbol, was when Bruce Springsteen put a pair of jeans front and center on the album cover for born in the USA. Today, blue jeans have annual sales in the tens of billions of dollars per year, with hundreds of millions sold annually in just the United States. The oldest pair of blue jeans in the world sits in a safe in the Levi-Strauss headquarters, and they were manufactured in 1879. One such pair of jeans made in 1893, which were found in a trunk and never worn, were sold at auction in 2018 for $100,000. The most expensive pair of retail jeans, without expensive gems or precious metals embedded,

was sold by Gucci for $3,100. The largest pair of blue jeans ever created were 65.5 meters or 210 feet tall and 42.7 meters or 140 feet wide. They were created by a company in Peru who then took the cloth to make 10,000 denim bags. After 150 years, blue jeans show no sign of going out of fashion. It's one of the few things which you'll see on both a ranch and on the runway during fashion week. Perhaps the words of Neil Diamond were prophetic. Maybe we will be forever in blue jeans.

The associate producer of Everything Everywhere daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. if you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.