The Riveting History of Blue Jeans

The idea for this story came to us at a coffee shop in Ann Arbor, MI, last week. While on vacation, a couple of our team members observed that 20 out of the 27 people sitting around us were wearing blue jeans (including us).

Jeans are a $100+ billion global industry and worn by millions of people every day. But not a single member of our table knew how they originated. So we placed a bet – would anyone else in the shop know?

• Full disclosure: We didn't approach anyone with headphones in or in the middle of something (we're not monsters). So we only got 11 answers, and most of them were some variation of "no, but that'd be kinda cool to learn about."

👖 Thus, our story begins… with a twill cotton fabric originating in the 1500s. According to economics professor Michael C. Howard, denim was produced in France, Italy, and India during that time to make durable work trousers and overalls.

But the modern-day jeans we know weren't introduced in the US until the mid-1800s, when two men – one whose name has more-or-less faded into obscurity and one whose name we still know to this day – linked up to form a partnership during the Gold Rush in the American West.

The two men in question? Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss.

💡 The groundbreaking discovery… Jacob Davis was a tailor in Reno, Nevada. One day in 1871, "[a] miner's wife came up to Davis and asked him to come up with pants that could withstand some abuse," American History Museum curator Nancy Davis (no relation) told the Smithsonian.

Davis then looked at the metal fasteners he used on harnesses and other objects, and decided to place copper rivets at the places where pants usually ripped: the pockets and the crotch.

That worked like a charm. Local miners were lining up to purchase these rivet-strengthened pants, and Davis wanted to make sure no one stole his idea.

He couldn't afford the $68 necessary to obtain a patent, so he approached Levi Strauss, a dry-goods store owner who had sold him the durable "duck cloth" canvas for the pants in the first place, about a partnership.

Strauss agreed, and on May 20, 1873, the two were granted a patent for the first "official" blue jean, solidifying their early hold on a brand-new workwear category of their creation: riveted pants. The pants were dyed indigo, which is where "blue jeans" came from.

Jeans stayed extremely popular as sensible workwear until becoming more mainstream in the 1920s and 1930s (even appearing on the cover of Vogue), eventually becoming so popular as to lead 74% of a random coffee shop to adorn themselves in the pants on a given day.

And to think it all started with a tiny little rivet.