Page 12 - Exercise 2

Page 12 - Exercise 2

The story of jeans

In 1848, someone discovered gold in California and soon thousands of people were travelling to the west coast of the USA. One of these people was a German immigrant called Levi Strauss. He was only twenty-four years old when he arrived in San Francisco. He wasn’t looking for gold. He was a wholesaler.

He imported goods and sold them to small shops.

Strauss used to sell a lot of cloth to a tailor in Nevada - a Latvian immigrant called Jacob Davis. Davis made clothes for the gold miners and railway workers. They needed strong clothes, but it was hot in California, so woollen trousers were no good.

Davis used to make most of his trousers from denim. This was made of cotton and it was very strong, but it was also soft and comfortable. People called it ‘denim’, because it originally came from Nimes in France. ‘De Nimes’ means ‘from Nimes’.

However, the trousers weren’t strong enough for one of Davis’s customers, so Davis decided to make them stronger. He used copper rivets on the pockets and other places, and so invented jeans. Soon other tailors started to make jeans, too. Davis wanted to protect his idea, but he didn’t have enough money for a patent.

So he wrote to Levi Strauss. Strauss paid $68 for the patent and the two men became business partners. Their blue jeans were so popular that they soon had to build a factory to produce them.

For the next hundred years people only wore jeans as work clothes. But then in the 1950s, film stars, like James Dean, and pop stars, wore them and they became very fashionable.

Teenagers loved them because their parents didn’t use to wear them.

Today jeans come in all kinds of styles and colours. Designers also use denim for shorts jackets, shirts, skirts, dresses, hats, suits. In fact, everything except socks and underwear. You can even have denim shoes and boots.