Trippin' down Nostalgia Lane - First pair of Levi's

[packman]

HE WAS BORN in a Bavarian village in 1829, fleeing anti-Semitism with his family at 17. From New York he caught a steamer to California, a newly minted American citizen, with a view to expanding the family’s dry-goods business. But these were the heady days of the Gold Rush, and the young man dreamed of making it big. His initiative paid off so well that you may be wearing his invention now: his name was Levi Strauss.

Technically, the entrepreneur who went by “Uncle Levi” didn’t invent the copper rivets on denim “waist overalls” that became his firm’s stock-in-trade. The idea came from a tailor in Nevada who bought cloth from Strauss to make work clothes for labourers. In 1872 Jacob Davis persuaded him to jointly file for a patent for an “improvement in fastening pocket openings”, and to shift from selling fabric to finished trousers. The rest is a history of marketing genius—documented in the largest-ever public display of artefacts from the Levi Strauss & Co. archive

Those rolled up leg cuffs, that little pocket on the side, the rivets - That and a white T-shirt and , man, you were the bomb - so fuckin' cool.

Brought back memories of my local school, way back when, trying to stop the Levi wearing trend because the rivets in the back pockets were wearing (I kid you not) the wooden desk chairs down and they had too resand them and refinish them at the end of each school year. That's what they said, we all called bull shit on that.

http://extragoodshit.phlap.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-legend-of-Levi-Strauss.html

[mercuryblues]

1. Those rivets were more than decoration

People were complaining that their denim pants were wearing out before the rest of the denim pants. Levi added the rivets and problem solved.

[cyclonefence]

3. Originally there was a rivet in the crotch

where the leg inseams meet, but complaints from cowpokes and others who crouch around campfires, heating that crotch rivet, caused Levi Strauss to stop putting a rivet there.

[mercuryblues]

4. I could see how

that would be uncomfortable for people riding horses all day.

[cyclonefence]

6. Actually it was because of scrotum burn

Cowboys didn't wear underpants, and squatting in front of a campfire with the crotch held before the fire made the rivet heat up.

But horseback riding would be a problem, too!

[cwydro]

2. Schools in my city didn't allow jeans until late 70s.

“Way back when” is relative I guess, lol.

[hunter]

5. I wanted to wear Levis but my parents couldn't afford them.

They'd had more children then they could comfortably support.

We wore clothes from Sears, which my parents bought on credit at the beginning of each school year.

I got my first pair of actual Levis for Christmas. I was in high school.

Alas, they didn't turn me into one of the popular kids.