In 2022, a frayed, faded, paint-stained, and holey (but still wearable) pair of Levi’s sold for $87,400 at auction. The jeans, dubbed the “holy grail” of vintage denim, have been dated back to the late 1880s. A tag inside them bearing the message “The only kind made by white labor” serves as a reminder of the Anti-Chinese rhetoric prevalent during that era: in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act restricted Chinese laborers from immigrating to America for a decade and many businesses—Levi Strauss Co., included—sought to increase sales by publicly aligning with the white supremacist values common among American consumers.
While it may not always be as explicit as words printed on a tag, the clothing we wear has always been inextricably linked to the prevailing values and political climate of a given time period—especially what we wear on our legs. Skirt hemlines allegedly raise and lower in accordance with the health of the economy; trousers have represented freedom for men, and then for women; and even the material your stockings are made of has shifted from silk, to nylon, to, at times, tea-stained skin and a line painted along the back of the calves, depending on whether the U.S. is at war and with whom.
Jeans, the quintessentially American piece of clothing that transcends both time and trends, are one of the best examples of how culture shifts fashion, and vice versa. They have served as a symbol of rebellion, of youth culture, of American individualism and even of Civil Rights. But, for all they stand for, the well-known history surrounding their origins may just be the most interesting thing about them—particularly how much of it is just plain wrong.
It should come as no surprise, now, that anything considered “quintessentially American,” almost definitely stemmed from slavery.
6,000 years ago, Ancient Egyptians discovered, cultivated, and developed techniques to process a plant called indigo. These techniques yielded a deep blue pigment that was then used to dye cloth, and these cloths were considered, if not sacred, close to it. The practices eventually made their way throughout other parts of Africa, as well as Asia and the Caribbean. Indigo thrives in tropical climates, which meant that, to get your hands on it anywhere else, the price was steep, leading to the nickname “blue gold.”
Eliza Lucas, the daughter of a colonial governor, is credited as the one who brought indigo to America, when she took over her father’s South Carolina plantation at only 16 years old. This huge breakthrough could actually most likely be attributed to enslaved Africans on said plantation utilizing their knowledge—passed on through generations—of how to grow and extract dye from the plant. Nevertheless, by the 1770s, indigo had become a major export of the United States, with over one million pounds traded anually.
While the words “jeans” and “denim” are used interchangeably, now, they are actually two different textiles with two different origins, and neither of them is technically identical to what we call jeans or denim, today. We know that “jeans” come from Genoa, Italy, where one of the largest exports was a sturdy cotton/wool cloth originally dyed with indigo, but eventually colored blue with a much cheaper alternative called woad. This textile, called Bleu de Gênes (Blue of Genoa), was mainly exported to a place called Nîmes, France, where they—seeking to reduce their dependence on Italian cloth manufacturers—eventually developed their own “knock-off” out of wool and raw silk. This equally sturdy and durable fabric was called Serge de Nîmes.
This early precursor to what we now know as denim was imported into America by slaveowners in order to outfit enslaved Africans in a way that made them distinct from the linens, laces and silk they wore as wealthy whites. This “slave cloth” was itchy and uncomfortable, but made for very durable overalls and pants that stood up to hard labor without tearing or needing to be repaired too often.
With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became the backbone of American industry. Eli Whitney, the inventor of the gin, originally intended the machine to decrease demand on slave labor. Unfortunately, as we will see many times over the course of history, automation only bred exploitation: the ability of the machine to process one hundred pounds of cotton—versus only ten pounds a day by hand—lead to the growing of even more, which required even more labor to process and turn into what was now referred to as “blue jeans.” This explosion in demand for cotton clothing and the resulting economic boom didn’t slow down until the abolishment of slavery in the South following the Civil War. And this is where the more mainstream history of jeans typically begins.
Jacob Davis moved to Reno, Nevada in 1868 where he got a job helping a man named Frederick Hertlein set up a brewery which failed, leaving both men with nothing. Realizing there was a huge demand for outdoor equipment like tents and horse blankets, Davis—having worked as a tailor upon first arriving in America from Latvia—used his sewing skills to provide supplies for local railroad workers. He bought his supplies from a nearby dry goods salesman named Levi Strauss, namely duck canvas and an indigo-dyed twill called denim.
One day, one of the wives of the laborers Davis sold to entered his shop desperate for a pair of work pants that wouldn’t wear out so quickly, as she was the one who had to repair them constantly. Davis took on the challenge with spectacular results: using the heavy denim to construct the pants and—the most important improvement—copper rivets from his horse blankets to reinforce stress points, Jacob Davis created the first pair of modern blue jeans.
Soon, Davis had more orders for blue jeans than he could handle, and, as other tailors began to copy his design, he sought to both protect his invention and scale up production. With next to no money and not-so-great English skills, he reached out to someone he knew would be able to help: his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss.
The patent for the new blue jeans names both Davis and Strauss, though, according to Davis’s original letter to Strauss, he would’ve preferred to be the only patent holder—perhaps because he knew that he, a poor Latvian immigrant, would be all but erased from the history of his own invention. Still, the two worked together until Davis’s death in 1908, with Davis overseeing the Levi Strauss factory and helping to design other lines of clothing for the company.
Here, we reach our final divide between “history” and the truth: who brought blue jeans to the mainstream? When exactly did the pants go from a uniform for hard laborers to a garment that, at any given time, is being worn by half of the world?
It wasn’t cowboys or rock stars, or even James Dean: It was freedom fighters.
During the Civil Rights Movement, blue jeans—sturdy enough to withstand the powerful hoses and bites from attack dogs used against activists—were a symbol of protest. Though many saw their use as a painful reminder of both enslavement and the sharecropper system—James Brown famously refused to wear them and forbade his band members from donning them, as well—for others, denim stood for the struggle for equality. Even women traded in their “respectable” clothing for denim skirts and overalls, wearing them with their natural hair in solidarity with the mostly men who were the face of the fight.
While most of America stood against Blacks during the Movement, white youths absorbed the anti-establishment principles. Beatniks and hippies would adopt the same head-to-toe denim looks that Black activists wore during the March on Washington—inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy’s own denim outfits worn during their arrests in Birmingham, Alabama.
Jeans are woven into the very fabric of American History—even the most shameful parts. I don’t share this history to make you rethink your choice in clothes, but rather to help you understand how that choice even came to be. I wish I could say that the most painful injustices surrounding what we wear are over, but, as we speak, millions of people—including children—are forced under terrible conditions to make the garments we take for granted. To put it simply: clothes are not just clothes.
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This is SO interesting, thank you for all of your research. 🩷
This was so incredibly interesting, I had absolutely no idea how much history that involved enslavement was interwoven with jeans and denim.