About a month ago, a building in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood was torn down, revealing on an adjacent structure an advertisement painted on the wall. The ad, from 1921, was for Boss of the Road overalls and work shirts. Boss of the Road, which went out of business around World War II, was a main competitor of Levi Strauss & Co.
Long before the world obsession with blue jeans (and before people were paying hundreds–or, in some cases, thousands) of dollars for a pair of denim, Levi Strauss was the outfitter of Gold Rush minors. And in (accidentally) doing so, he changed fashion forever.
And it happened more or less by accident. Levi Strauss had come to San Francisco with rolls of canvas and bolts he hoped to sell on the Barbary Coast to miners to cover their wagons as they headed out to gold country. But, as Daniel Bacon writes in his book “Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail,” “[w]hen he found sturdy trousers in demand, Strauss cut a few bolts into pants and sold them to miners.”
When Strauss ran out of tan canvas, he began using a blue cloth imported from France called “serge de Nimes,” later called “denim.” Once fashioned into pants, the denim looked a lot the trousers worn by sailors from Genoa, which the French called “genes.” You can see where this is going.
And with that, a new fashion was born. Interestingly, as C.W. Nevius wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle recently, it was the Japanese that made these jeans into the uber-popular fashion we know and love today.
Quoting Levi’s historian Lynn Downey, he writes:
“‘Young Japanese men with lots of discretionary income went through World War II seeing American servicemen with jeans, bomber jackets and Zippo lighters,’ she said. ‘They wanted those for themselves.’ Speculators from Japan came to the United States and bought up jeans in bulk, driving up demand. That coincided with a youth boom in jeans, which eventually made them so mainstream that versions now sell for hundreds of dollars.”
To see the most expensive pair of jeans in the world, stop by the Levi Strauss & Co. museum. The jeans date from 1873-1890 and are valued at $150,000.