Jodie Foster, Billie Perkins, and Robert De Niro perform a scene in Taxi Driver directed by Martin Scorsese in 1976 in New York, New York. Michael Ochs Archives | Moviepix | Getty ImagesIn the dwindling days of the California gold rush, the wife of a local miner faced a problem. Her husband’s denim work pants kept ripping, so her tailor, Jacob Davis, had the idea to add copper rivets to key points of strain, like the pocket corners and the base of the button fly, to keep them from tearing. Davis’ “riveted pants” soon became a roaring success and, unbeknownst to him at the time, marked the official birth of the blue jean, a garment that would transform fashion and come to represent the United States around the globe. “It really has democratized American fashion and it also is the greatest export that we have sent to the world, because people identify jeans specifically with American Western culture,” said Shawn Grain Carter, a fashion professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “It doesn’t matter your economic or social class. It doesn’t matter what your views are in terms of the political spectrum. Everybody wears denim.” Jacob DavisCourtesy: Levi Strauss & Co.These days, denim is a major sales driver for retailers big and small, as the global denim market reached $101 billion this year, up 28% from 2020, according to data from market research company Euromonitor International. Major apparel companies from American Eagle to Levi Strauss are in a race to corner that market, leaning on A-list celebrities like Sydney Sweeney and Beyonce to win over shoppers and drive sales in an unsteady economy.But if it weren’t for Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous blue jeans company, Davis’ invention may not have gone far beyond the railroad town where it was created in the early 1870s. How Levi’s created blue jeansSoon after Davis created his riveted pants, called “waist overalls” or “overalls” at the time, they began selling like “hot cakes” and he needed a business partner to secure a patent, said Tracey Panek, Levi’s in-house historian. So he wrote to Strauss, a Bavarian-born immigrant who was running a successful wholesale business in San Francisco and had supplied Davis the denim he used to create his riveted pants. “The secret of them Pents is the Rivits that …
