Search This Blog

Sunday 5 October 2014

Denim

Levi Strauss, a 20-year-old Bavarian immigrant, left New York for the Californian gold rush in 1850. He brought with him a small supply of rough canvas to sell to the prospectors for tents and wagon covers. When a prospector complained he couldn’t find a pair of pants strong enough to last, Strauss had the canvas made into pants. Miners liked the pants, but complained that they tended to chafe, so Strauss substituted a twilled cotton cloth from France called "serge de Nimes," which became known as denim.

Serge is the name of a fabric that was first made in Nîmes, a town in southern France by the André family.

Denim was usually colored blue with indigo dye to make blue "jeans", though "jean" meant a different, lighter cotton textile.

In 1873, Levi Strauss & Co. began using the pocket stitch design.

Between 1973 and 1975 Volkswagen produced the Jeans Beetle, which had all-denim trim. They also repeated this concept in some later models.

The FBI analyzes denim patterns when tracking criminals, since jeans fade in unique ways depending on who's wearing them.

Over 50% of denim is produced in Asia, most of it in Bangladesh, China and India.

Sources Inventors.about.com, Wikipedia

No comments:

Post a Comment