Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Blue Jeans (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. Unquestionably, the most popular clothing innovation in the last 150 years has been Blue Genes. They can be found all over the world, yet they've become synonymous with American culture. While the Blue Genes are definitely American, their origin actually goes back centuries to Europe. Learn more about the history of Blue Genes 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.

Starting point is 00:00:54 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:36 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 Dijens. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:13 Today, Dungaree 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. Denim gets its name from Dene, which just means from Neme in French. Gene and denim cloth was a popular cheap cloth for working people in Europe, and there are a 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.

Starting point is 00:02:46 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 1829 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' brother and company. Levi worked for his brothers, eventually moving to Kentucky, to represent the company, until they decided to send him to California.

Starting point is 00:03:19 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 a 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

Starting point is 00:03:50 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. And in 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.

Starting point is 00:04:31 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

Starting point is 00:05:11 rube. The status of blue jeans really started to change in the 1950s. In particular, their depiction in film changed the cultural perception of genes. 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. Wearing 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

Starting point is 00:05:59 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 Regie de Bray 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 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 Petrovich Vavishenko were actually executed after a show trial for trafficking in black market jeans. The blue jeans brand,

Starting point is 00:06:35 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, genes 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.

Starting point is 00:07:00 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,

Starting point is 00:07:50 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 would. will be forever in Blue Jeans. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

Starting point is 00:08:35 I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Blue Jeans (Encore)

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