Levi Strauss, a 17-year-old immigrant from Bavaria arrived in San Francisco during the great Gold Rush of the 1850s to sell canvas for tents and covered wagons. When he discovered that the miners trousers wore out fast, he decided to make trousers out of the canvas with metal rivets on the pocket comers to give them more durability. The trousers were in great demand because of their toughness and snug fit, which he got by making a miner sit with his jeans in a horse-watering trough, and then lie down in the sun till it shrank.
Levi’s trousers were called jeans after gene, the Genoese name for the heavy, twilled canvas. Later, when Levi used a softer French fabric called Serge de Nimes, his trousers came to be called denim jeans. Levi Strauss & Co., the company Levi founded, is the world’s first and largest manufacturer of denim jeans.
Picture Credit : Google
