That could make sense, McClendon points out, given the “technological developments in cotton spinning” in England at the time, as well as the “immense reserves of cotton and indigo” available to the country from its colonies in India and the Americas. Indigo is the plant-based dye that puts the blue in blue jeans.
Wherever the fabric originated, it arrived in the American colonies well before the Revolution of 1776. The phrase “serge denim breeches” appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper as early as 1723, describing clothing worn by a runaway ship hand. Levi Strauss, the Bavarian immigrant sometimes credited with introducing denim pants to America, wasn’t even born until 1829.
Enter Levi Strauss—and Rivets
Strauss does, however, deserve a large share of the credit for blue jeans as we know them today. In fact, the Levi Strauss & Co. website goes so far as to proclaim him “the inventor of the quintessential American garment.”
Strauss arrived in the U.S. in the late 1840s to join two of his brothers in a wholesale dry goods business based in New York City. “Dry goods” in those days referred to a wide range of wares, but especially to fabric, which appears to have been one of the brothers’ specialties. In 1853, Strauss left by boat for San Francisco, hoping to cash in on the California Gold Rush that had begun four years earlier by establishing a branch of the family business there.
It would still be another 20 years before the invention of his popular jeans, and Strauss was not the sole inventor. Half of that honor belongs to Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada, tailor who had discovered he could make work pants more durable by adding metal rivets at strategic points. Wanting to expand production, he approached Strauss, whose business supplied his fabric, writes Lynn Downey in her 2016 biography Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World.
In 1872, the two men filed a U.S. patent application for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” which was granted in 1873. Blue jeans had not only been born, but patented.
Strauss went into business manufacturing the jeans, with Davis serving as factory superintendent, Downey writes. Around 1906, two years after Strauss’ death, and two years before his own, Davis signed over his rights in the famous patent to Levi Strauss & Co., the business that survived them both and lives on to this day.