Making jeans in San Francisco gives us a reason to keep coming back to denim's history. There are the familiar names, of course, and then there are the smaller details that get more interesting the longer you look: why a pocket was reinforced, what a garment used to be called, where the fabric was made before it reached a sewing machine.
Our own jeans are a small present-day part of that much larger subject. We make them for children, with elastic waists and room in the leg. The history doesn't give us a pattern to copy so much as a lot of things to pay attention to.
Two people, and a change to the construction
Levi Strauss came to San Francisco in 1853 as a dry-goods merchant. Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno who bought cloth from Strauss's company, developed a way to reinforce stress points on pants with rivets. Their patent was granted on May 20, 1873.
The Levi Strauss & Co. archive treats that patent as a key moment in the blue-jeans story. Denim work pants already existed; riveted construction was the development in this partnership.
You may have heard the story about Strauss turning tent canvas into miners' pants. The company's own historical research (PDF) corrects that account. What remains is a merchant, a tailor and a specific way of putting a garment together.
From “waist overalls” to all those jean shapes
The early Levi's garments were called waist overalls. Pockets and reinforcement still make their workwear connection visible, even as jeans have become clothes for many different settings.
People also changed the garments themselves. Levi's introduction of bell-bottom and boot-cut styles in 1969 followed a period of wearers altering jeans, opening up seams and changing the silhouette. Our guide to jean shapes takes that thread into the straight, flared, wide and tapered legs you see now.
That's a part of the story we enjoy: the cloth stays recognizable while the person making or wearing it asks for a different shape.
Looking beyond the place a pair is sewn
Japan adds another manufacturing chapter. Big John's company history describes producing jeans in Japan in 1965, then fully domestically produced jeans in 1973. Those milestones point to two separate questions: where was the garment sewn, and where was its fabric made?
It's worth keeping both questions when you look at a pair today. The country on a label can be a starting point for learning about the work, without telling you everything about every garment made there.
The jeans we're making now
For our Lemon Patch Pocket Play Jean, the main denim is 13.75-ounce U.S.-grown cotton from Mt. Vernon Mills in Georgia, and the sewing happens in San Francisco. The leg is relaxed and a little cropped, with an elastic waist. Those are the choices that bring the fabric into the kind of children's garment we wanted to make.
The Vintage Fabric Pocket Play Jean brings older found fabrics into the pockets of a new pair. It gives the material another place to be seen. That's different from starting with an existing secondhand garment and changing it, and both approaches have a place in our work.
You can read why we chose this denim for more of the current making story. If you're choosing a pair, the cotton kids jeans guide gets practical about fit and care. History can send you down quite a few interesting paths; sometimes it also makes you turn a pair of jeans inside out and look a little more closely.
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