Blue Jeans Patented: Levi Strauss Revolutionizes Fashion

Jacob Davis, a Latvian-born tailor working in Reno, Nevada, came up with the idea of using copper rivets to reinforce the stress points on work pants after a customer's wife complained that her husband kept tearing through his trousers. Davis placed rivets at the pocket corners and the base of the fly, creating pants durable enough for miners, laborers, and ranchers. On May 20, 1873, Davis and his fabric supplier, San Francisco wholesaler Levi Strauss, received US Patent No. 139,121 for the process of riveting clothing. Davis had been buying his denim and duck cloth from Levi Strauss & Co. for years. When he realized the riveted pants were selling as fast as he could make them, he wanted to patent the idea but lacked the $68 filing fee. He wrote to Strauss proposing a partnership: Davis would contribute the invention, Strauss would fund the patent and handle manufacturing at scale. Strauss recognized the opportunity immediately and agreed. The original riveted pants were made from two fabrics: brown cotton duck and blue denim. The denim version, dyed with indigo, proved more popular with workers and eventually became the standard. The pants were sold as "waist overalls" and marketed to laborers in the American West. They were tough, affordable, and designed for physical work. The copper rivets, the key innovation, prevented seams from tearing under the strain of loading ore, bending fence wire, or climbing scaffolding. Blue jeans remained workwear for roughly eighty years. Hollywood westerns in the 1930s and 1940s began associating denim with rugged American individualism. Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans symbols of youthful rebellion in the 1950s. By the 1960s, jeans had crossed every social boundary, worn by factory workers, college students, rock musicians, and eventually fashion designers who charged hundreds of dollars for artificially distressed versions of a garment originally built to resist destruction. The riveted pocket patent expired in 1891, but the brand Davis and Strauss created remains one of the most recognized in the world.