How were jeans invented?

 Florentina Marin VII B 
  

Pop groups wear them. You wear them. They are the best-known item of clothing in the universe. They are comfortable, they are stylish, they are jeans!

The story of jeans started at the time of the American Gold Rush. In 1849 thousands of people went to California to dig for gold and hopefully make their fortune. Among them was a young man called Levi Strauss who went to California from Germany at the age of 18. He didn’t find any gold but the made a lot of money.

Levi S. realised that the gold miners needed very strong clothes which were easy to wash and which were comfortable to wear. So in the early 1850’s , he bought some thick cotton denim from a mill in New Hampshire, USA. The name denim used to describe the cotton, came from serge de Nimes, after the town of Nimes in the south of France, Levi S. decided to make trousers from this strong material.

“If I make the trousers from denim he thought, I’m sure people will buy them. They’d rather have trousers which will last a long time then the ones they-re wearing at present.” And he was right!

Levi Strauss’s trousers were later called jeans, possibly because sailors from Genoas in Italy wore them. The popularity of jeans increased and they were soon sold right across the USA. In 1873, stitching shaped like the wing of the Rocky Mountain Eagle, was added.

In the 1950’s, the fashion for jeans arrived in Europe. A magazine advertisement showen that in the USA, jeans were worn every day and not just at work. People in Europe began to wear jeans in their free time.

In the 1980s a jeans advertisement appeared on British TV. In it, a young man walked into a launderette, took off his jeans and put them in a washing machine.

Everyone in the launderette was shocked. As a result of the advertisement make of jeans increased by 800 per cent.