DU 002: Blue Jean Baby (1800 - 1945)

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By Eric Steffen
Founder / Maker
FITTED Underground

The story of denim in the United States doesn't start with Levi Strauss. It shouldn't.

The canonical version goes like this: a Bavarian immigrant — Mr. Strauss — opens a dry goods store in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, sees an opportunity to make durable work pants for miners, patents the idea with a Nevada tailor, and launches the garment that will define American culture for the next century and a half. Clean origin story. Immigrant ingenuity. American Dream.

The real story is messier, older, darker, and considerably more interesting. And it starts — as the best stories do — not with one place or one people, but with many.

The Convergence

Denim was not invented. It converged.

The fabric structure — the 3/1 twill weave, the warp-faced diagonal that gives denim its strength and durability — came from European weaving traditions, specifically the workshops of Nîmes, France and the port of Genoa, Italy. As we explored in DU 001, the weavers of Nîmes developed serge de Nîmes — a sturdy cotton cloth with indigo-dyed warp threads crossed with undyed weft — and the sailors and dock workers of Genoa favored bleu de Gênes, blue of Genoa, cut for hard physical labor at sea. Serge de Nîmes became "denim." Bleu de Gênes became "jeans." The fabric, as a textile construction, is European.

The blue — the thing that makes denim denim in any meaningful cultural sense — is a different story. Indigo dyeing knowledge traveled the world for six thousand years before it reached the American continent, carried by Indian merchants along the Silk Road, developed independently by West African cultures into traditions of extraordinary sophistication, and eventually brought to the American South not by European botanists or colonial entrepreneurs, but by enslaved West Africans who carried that knowledge across the Middle Passage with them. The specific expertise that built the early American indigo industry — the cultivation techniques, the fermentation process, the vat management — came from people who had no choice in the matter and received no credit for it.

The garment architecture — the five pockets, the copper rivets, the specific cut of American jeans — is American, developed in Reno, Nevada in 1870 by a Latvian-born tailor named Jacob Davis, and scaled into a business by a Bavarian merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

Three continents. Multiple cultures. Generations of knowledge —
 some freely exchanged, some violently extracted.
That is the history of your favorite jean.

Three continents. Multiple cultures. Generations of accumulated knowledge, some freely exchanged, some violently extracted. That is what is in the garment on your body. The standard history credits one man and calls it an origin story. The actual history is a convergence — dark and magnificent in equal measure — and it deserves to be told that way.

The Cloth Before the Patent

Fifty years before Levi Strauss filed a single piece of paperwork, enslaved people in the American South were wearing a coarse, durable, indigo-dyed cotton fabric that history has called by several names: slave cloth, negro cloth, and — in advertisements for runaway enslaved people published in Southern newspapers — "blue jeans pants" and "jeans clothes."

This fabric was not a gift. It was a calculated minimum — chosen by enslavers for its durability and cheapness, deliberately rough, deliberately uncomfortable. People freed from slavery recalled it feeling like needles against the skin. And it was blue — dyed with indigo cultivated and processed by enslaved West Africans who had brought that knowledge across the Middle Passage with them, knowledge their enslavers did not have and could not replicate without them.

The cotton itself was picked by enslaved hands. The indigo expertise that gave it color came from West Africa. The fabric was produced in northern mills, shipped south, and distributed as a twice-yearly allotment — enough yardage to make the minimum necessary clothing for a year of brutal labor. Advertisements for escaped enslaved people consistently describe their clothing in terms that make clear that denim, long before Levi Strauss, was already the fabric of American labor — worn by the people doing most of it.

Here is an uncomfortable truth:
The garment we celebrate as a symbol of freedom
 was the uniform of people who had none.

The garment we celebrate as a symbol of American freedom was, for decades before its famous origin story, the uniform of people who had none. That history belongs to denim as surely as the copper rivets do. It doesn't diminish the story. It completes it.

The Real Inventor of Blue Jeans

Jacob Youphes was born in Riga, Latvia in 1831 into a Jewish family, and emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-three, changing his name to Jacob Davis. He worked as a journeyman tailor across New York, Maine, and northern California, panned unsuccessfully for gold in Canada, and eventually settled in Reno, Nevada, where he ran a small tailor shop and purchased his denim and duck cloth from a wholesale dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

In December 1870, the wife of a local laborer came to Davis with a simple request: make a pair of pants for her husband that wouldn't fall apart. He reached for the duck cloth he had in stock and, looking for a way to reinforce the points of strain that always failed first — the pocket corners, the base of the button fly — he reached for the copper rivets he used for horse blankets. The result held. Word spread through the mining and railroad camps around Reno. Davis couldn't keep up with orders.

He had a problem, though: he knew what he had, and he couldn't protect it alone. A patent application cost approximately sixty-eight dollars — money he didn't have. So in 1872 he wrote a letter to his fabric supplier in San Francisco, a letter whose spelling was unconventional but whose intent was unmistakable. He explained the innovation, described the demand, and proposed that Strauss co-file the patent and provide the capital for manufacturing, in exchange for shared rights to the invention.

Strauss agreed immediately. He recognized the commercial potential in the time it took to read the letter. Patent number 139,121 — "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings" — was granted to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss & Company on May 20, 1873. Davis moved to San Francisco, managed the factory Strauss built to produce the pants, invented the double-arc stitching on the back pockets that remains on every pair of Levi's to this day, and worked for the company until his death in 1908. He died in relative obscurity. His pants became known to the world as Levi's.

The man who conceived the innovation, solved the technical problem, and managed production for thirty-five years is not the name on the product. 

It's worth sitting with that for a moment. The man who conceived the innovation, solved the technical problem, and managed production for thirty-five years is not the name on the product. In any other industry — technology, pharmaceuticals, engineering — we would call Jacob Davis the inventor and wonder at the injustice of it. In denim, he is a footnote. History remembers the name of the merchant with the money, not the tailor with the idea.

The patent, for what it's worth, lists Davis's name first.

The Gold Rush and the Nation Being Built

With the patent secured, Levi Strauss & Co. scaled quickly. By the 1880s, a full factory in San Francisco. By the 1890s, the style known as "XX" — later renamed the 501 — was the best-selling men's work pant in the American West. The garment had no official name yet: consumers and the company called them "waist overalls," and they wouldn't be widely called "jeans" until the baby boomers gave them that name in the 1950s.

In Kansas in 1889, Henry David Lee founded his mercantile company and launched his own line of workwear. Lee's instinct for innovation would eventually outpace Levi's in some respects: Lee introduced the first zip fly in 1927, developed Jelt denim — a heavier, tighter-twisted fabric engineered specifically for durability — and created the Union-All coverall that became the standard garment for industrial workers across the American Midwest. Geographically, Levi's and Lee divided the country between them: Levi's owned the West Coast, Lee owned the Midwest and East. Both brands understood that they were not in the fashion business. They were in the infrastructure business — making the clothes that built the country.

Neither brand was thinking about culture. Culture had other plans.

The Cowboy, the Dude Ranch, and Wrangler

Hollywood discovered the cowboy in the 1920s and 30s, and the cowboy was almost always wearing denim. John Wayne wore it on screen with the quiet authority of a man who had never once thought about what he was wearing, which was precisely the point. The cowboy archetype — rugged, self-reliant, uncomplicated — needed a garment to match, and denim fit the role as naturally as if it had been written for it.

The dude ranch craze of the 1930s brought denim to a new audience. Wealthy Easterners began vacationing on working ranches in the West — helping with chores, riding horses, living, briefly and expensively, the cowboy life they'd seen in movie theaters. Women wore denim pants, many of them for the first time. Denim pages appeared in Vogue. The garment was crossing its first social boundary.

Wrangler entered the picture in 1947, designed from the ground up for the professional cowboy by a tailor named Bernard Lichtenstein — known as Rodeo Ben — a Jewish immigrant from Łódź, Poland, with no cowboy heritage whatsoever, designing the definitive American cowboy jean. Working closely with rodeo riders and testing thirteen prototype pairs before settling on the final design, Lichtenstein built the 11MWZ with a deeper watch pocket for easy access on horseback, felled seams that wouldn't chafe under a saddle, and flat rivets that wouldn't scratch expensive leather. By 1974 the Wrangler 13MWZ was the official jean of the Rodeo Cowboys Association. The Big Three now had their respective tribes: Levi's for the working man and the rebel, Lee for the industrial worker, Wrangler for the cowboy and the rancher.

The Darker Thread: Cotton, Slavery, and the Industry Behind the Industry

The American denim industry was built on cotton. And American cotton, for the first two centuries of this country's existence, was built on enslaved labor. This is not a digression from the history of denim — it is the history of denim.

The cotton that fed the northern mills that produced the fabric that became American workwear was picked by enslaved people on Southern plantations. The indigo that gave it its blue was processed by enslaved West Africans using knowledge their enslavers had not developed and could not replicate. Eliza Lucas Pinckney is often credited with establishing South Carolina's eighteenth-century indigo industry — but the knowledge she used came from enslaved people, not from her botanical experiments. When Benjamin Franklin sailed to France in 1776 to seek support for the American Revolution, he carried thirty-five barrels of indigo in the ship's hold to fund the trip. That indigo was produced by enslaved hands.

The Civil War formally ended slavery. What followed — sharecropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow — was slavery by other means, and denim remained the fabric of those doing the labor. Civil rights activists in the 1960s would deliberately choose denim overalls for marches and demonstrations, the garment of the sharecropper and the field worker, worn as a statement: we built this country, and this country has not kept its promises. The choice was not accidental. It carried the full weight of this history.

WWII: Denim Goes to War and Conquers the World

During World War II, denim was officially designated as essential material for the war effort. Levi's, Lee, and other American manufacturers pivoted to produce military uniforms, work clothes, and flight suits. The famous double-arc stitching on Levi's back pockets — so identified with the brand — was painted on rather than stitched during wartime rationing, to conserve thread. The garment was that important.

American GIs stationed across Europe and the Pacific wore their denim off-duty — to the bars, to the markets, to whatever makeshift entertainment existed in occupied territory. For people in war-torn countries seeing Americans for the first time, the jeans carried a meaning that transcended clothing. They represented prosperity, the winning side, a different way of being in the world. Behind the Iron Curtain, a pair of Levi's became a black market luxury — worth extraordinary sums to young people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who understood, intuitively, that the garment meant something about freedom that their governments could not easily suppress.

Denim spread across the world not through advertising but through history — carried in the duffel bags of the army that defeated fascism, and became a symbol of freedom by people who had never met an American.

Denim had spread across the world not through advertising or distribution but through history — carried in the duffel bags of the soldiers of the army that defeated fascism, received by the world as a symbol of liberation. That's a complicated inheritance for a garment born from enslaved labor. Denim carries all of it — the origins, the exploitation, the innovation, the symbol. It always has.

What Comes Next

Step back and look at what denim actually is by the time the soldiers come home in 1945. A fabric structure from French and Italian workshops. A blue from West African indigo knowledge, transmitted by force across the Atlantic. A garment architecture from a Latvian tailor in Nevada. Scaled into an industry by a Bavarian merchant in San Francisco. Worn first by enslaved people who had no choice. Then by miners and cowboys and factory workers who wore it because nothing else held up. Then carried across the world in the duffel bags of an army. Received as a symbol of freedom by people who had never met an American.

No single country made this garment. No single culture invented it. It is the product of a global convergence of knowledge, ambition, exploitation, and accident — and it is more honest, more human, and more interesting for all of that.

What comes next is the moment it stops being workwear and becomes something else entirely. On movie screens across America, two young men in denim are about to change everything once more. Not as workers. Not as cowboys. Not as soldiers. As rebels. As the misunderstood, the restless, the young. Denim is about to stop being a garment and become a language. That story is DU 003.

← Previous: DU 001 — Indigo Around the World  |  Next: DU 003 — Boom and Then Bust →

Further Reading

• Riveted: The History of Jeans — PBS American Experience
• Jacob W. Davis — Wikipedia
• Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves — MESDA Journal
• Red, White and Indigo: The Hidden Commodity of the Slave Trade — CFDA
• Runaway Slave Notices Database — Digital Library on American Slavery, UNC Greensboro

Eric Steffen is the founder of FITTED Underground, a custom jeans and raw denim workshop at 108 Bayard Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has been making jeans by hand since 2014. Denim University is his attempt to share everything he's learned — about the history, the craft, and the culture behind the world's most enduring garment.