The History of Jeans: Pockets, Patents and Doing Your Own Thing

THE HISTORY OF · CHAPTER 03

A torn pocket, a tailor’s workbench and a very useful bit of metal. The history of jeans starts with practical problems, then wanders into courtrooms, aircraft factories and some wonderfully personal trousers.

Have a look at the corner of a jeans pocket. That little rivet is doing a job people were arguing about in a California courtroom more than 150 years ago. The small pocket tucked inside the bigger one has a story too. So does the way your jeans fit after a wash.

Follow those details and you get a history full of people making things work: a customer asking for stronger trousers, women dressing for jobs and freedoms they had been denied, and travellers covering worn denim with patches. There are famous names along the way, but plenty of the interesting bits belong to people whose names never reached a waistband label.

Here is how jeans became jeans, with a few stops beyond the usual cowboy photograph. If you want to connect the old details with a pair you can wear today, the HSS jeans comparison is further down.

Denim was already getting on with the job

The Museum at FIT holds a pair of American men’s trousers dated to about 1840, made from blue brushed cotton and denim. They are a useful starting point: sturdy denim trousers existed decades before the date usually given as the birth of blue jeans. You can see the garment in the museum’s collection record.

Then there is the colour. Some early Levi Strauss riveted trousers were brown. The Smithsonian’s surviving duck trousers, dated between 1873 and 1896, are made from heavy cotton canvas. Their label offered both duck and denim clothing. Rivets were a useful idea across more than one cloth.

That leaves us with three things to follow: denim as a fabric, trousers made for hard wear, and metal reinforcement at places likely to fail. The famous 1873 patent brought the last of those into a very successful business.

A patent for people putting their hands in their pockets

On 20 May 1873, Jacob W. Davis received US patent 139,121, assigned to himself and Levi Strauss & Company. Its title was “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings”. A modest name for something that would end up in wardrobes all over the place.

The document describes a familiar failure: pressure at a pocket opening pulls on the stitching until the seam starts to give. Davis put a metal rivet or eyelet through the cloth at each edge, taking some of that strain away from the thread.

His example of what caused the damage is pleasantly ordinary: hands going into pockets. You can understand the problem without a pickaxe, a horse or a dramatic frontier sunset.

There is another detail in the original two-page patent. Davis acknowledged earlier uses of rivets in shoe seams. He was careful to describe his particular application to trouser pocket openings. That narrow, practical fix is worth remembering whenever a jeans origin story gets a bit carried away.

The customer, the horse blankets and the court case

The National Archives holds a rather better source than a good yarn repeated often enough: Davis’s testimony in a patent dispute.

According to the archive’s account, Davis said that in January 1871 a woman asked him to make strong trousers for her husband. He had been riveting straps to horse blankets. With rivets sitting on his worktable, he decided to use them at the pockets. You can read the National Archives account and document for yourself.

On 31 January 1874, Davis and Strauss sued A. B. Elfelt and others for patent infringement, seeking US$20,000. The court found in their favour on 10 February 1875, awarding US$2,000.

So the business of jeans included legal arguments almost from the start. More usefully, the testimony puts a customer’s request at the centre of the invention. Someone needed trousers to hold together. A tailor borrowed a method from another job on his bench. The idea earned its reputation by solving that problem.

The advertising made the promise hard to miss. In this early Levi Strauss & Co. advert, two horses pull in opposite directions while the trousers hold firm. It is a sales pitch, of course, but a good picture of how the rivet became part of the product’s identity.

The fifth pocket came later. So did your belt loops.

Most of us recognise a five-pocket jean without counting. Two at the front, two at the back, and the little one inside the right front pocket. It feels like a design that arrived fully formed.

Levi Strauss & Co.’s historian Tracey Panek gives a more interesting sequence. The early Levi’s design had four pockets, including the small watch pocket and just one rear pocket. A second back pocket arrived in 1901. In that sense, the back pocket was the actual fifth pocket.

Even the company once muddled the story. Panek points to a 1996 advert that presented the tiny front pocket as the fifth. It is oddly reassuring to find a brand historian correcting her own advertising department.

Belt loops followed on Levi’s jeans in 1922. Earlier wearers relied on braces and a buckle at the back of the waist. The new loops joined the existing fittings for customers who still liked them. Panek records that some shops kept scissors at the counter so they could cut off the back cinch for customers switching to belts.

It is a small reminder that clothes change a bit at a time. A detail can be useful for one person, old-fashioned to another, and something a collector will be delighted to find a century later.

Women, work and room to move

By 1934, Levi Strauss & Co. was selling its Lady Levi’s line, Lot 701. The company records that Western women had already been wearing men’s jeans, and that dude-ranch holidays helped create demand for its women’s cut. Shops could sell the clothes to visitors before they headed west. See the company’s history of Lady Levi’s.

Jeans could serve both the person doing the ranch work and the person paying to spend a holiday there. The fabric stayed much the same while the reason for wearing it changed.

Alfred T. Palmer’s October 1942 photograph takes us into the Douglas Aircraft Company at Long Beach, California. The women are seated beneath a bomber, working in blue trousers. You can see bent knees, sturdy shoes, tools and the cramped space around them. Clothes that allowed movement had a very obvious job to do.

The National Archives’ account of wartime women’s clothing describes the move towards practical trousers and workwear alongside restrictions on materials. The photograph gives that broad story a specific setting. These are people dressed to get through a shift.

It is worth leaving room for women in the history of jeans. Their use of denim helped stretch the idea of who trousers were for, and where they belonged.

A different kind of denim rebellion

In the early 1960s, women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, adopted jeans and other denim clothes during civil rights organising. Historian Tanisha C. Ford studied the change in “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress”.

As JSTOR Daily’s accessible account of Ford’s research explains, denim suited rural organising and connected activists with the Black farm workers and sharecroppers they worked alongside. It also challenged expectations that women should present a carefully polished, middle-class appearance.

The choice drew disagreement, including questions about whether students were romanticising the clothes of people who had little choice about wearing them. That debate belongs in the story too.

Here, jeans carried arguments about class, gender and political solidarity. The people wearing them were making serious choices about how to work together and how to be seen.

The 1970s, in full colour

One of the best places to look at everyday jeans is an environmental archive. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s DOCUMERICA project began photographing in 1972. Its brief extended to people and daily life as well as pollution and landscapes. The National Archives’ history of the project explains how that wider view developed.

Charles O’Rear photographed this hitchhiker with his dog, Tripper, near Topock in May 1972. The trousers are covered with contrasting patches: patterned cloth, different colours, repairs and additions that take over much of the original denim.

The picture cannot tell us who sewed each patch or why it was added. It does let us see a pair that has become very individual. A standard trouser shape can carry a surprising amount of its wearer’s taste.

There is an enjoyable link back to Davis here. His patent set out to reduce the trouble of mending seams. A century later, visible additions and repairs could be part of what made a pair interesting.

Tom Hubbard’s July 1973 photograph shows young travellers stopping to take pictures in Cincinnati’s Fountain Square. Their backpacks are large, their jean hems are wide, and the camera needs rather more commitment than pulling out a phone.

Put these photographs beside Palmer’s factory scene and the change is easy to see. Denim works under an aircraft, at the roadside and in a city square. The cuts, combinations and reasons for wearing it keep changing.

They are also a useful check on the idea that there is one correct historic jeans silhouette. Slim, straight, roomy and flared all have a place in the story. You can enjoy the older details without letting someone else’s decade choose your trousers.

The shirt-collar connection, and a few denim terms

One word on a modern jeans listing has a surprisingly shirt-shaped history: sanforised.

Sanford Cluett worked for the collar and shirt business Cluett, Peabody. As customers moved from detachable collars towards shirts with attached soft collars, the company had a problem with garments shrinking in the wash. Its account of Cluett’s work describes his development of a compressive shrinking process, which took the name Sanforized from Sanford.

That is quite a journey for a term now discussed over turned-up jeans cuffs. It came from an everyday wish for clothes to keep fitting.

The shirt connection is right there in Cluett’s 1929 patent, too. It singles out collars, cuffs and bands as places where even a small amount of shrinkage could make clothing unusable. Nobody wants an otherwise perfectly good shirt with a collar that no longer closes.

For choosing jeans, the terms become easier if you keep the different jobs separate:

• Denim describes the cloth. Classic blue denim uses indigo-dyed lengthwise yarns and pale crosswise yarns, woven so the blue dominates the face. Cotton Incorporated’s denim guide explains the construction and dyeing.
• Selvedge describes the finished edge of the fabric. A shuttle carries the crosswise yarn back and forth, forming a clean woven edge at both sides. That is the edge you often see at a turned-up cuff. See CottonWorks’ weaving explanation.
• Raw generally describes jeans sold without a garment wash. They begin closer to the cloth’s unwashed state, ready to develop creases and wear through use.
• Sanforised means the fabric has had a treatment to reduce shrinkage. It can still be sold as raw denim. The two descriptions answer different questions.
• One-wash tells you the jeans have already had a wash before sale. The exact fit and remaining shrinkage still depend on the product.

A woven edge tells you something about construction. It does not choose the fit, guarantee a comfortable waistband or decide whether you will like the cloth. Those bits still need your attention.

And the fading? In ring-dyed indigo yarn, the centre stays pale. As the coloured surface wears, more of that lighter core can show. That is part of the reason the same pair can end up with very different-looking knees, pockets and folds. CottonWorks describes the white-core effect in its technical guide.

There is no need to turn this into a competition to avoid the washing machine. Follow the care instructions for the pair you own, wash when they need it, and let normal use supply the character.