Jeans

‘GENES’ is the French name for Genoa, and by extension of traditional style of trousers worn by Genoese sailors. Serve de Nimes was the name of a tough blue sailcloth, now corrupted to ‘denim’, traditionally woven in the French town. Levi Strauss (1829-1902) was a native of Bavaria who emigrated to New York at the age of fourteen and who joined his brothers in their business of supplying the prospectors and frontiersmen of Californian Gold Rush. Some time in 1860 Levi’s company had the idea of matching the denim cloth with the Geneoese trousers, and of strengthening the pockets and seams with brass horse-harness rivets. Thus was produced the most durable and universal item in the history of fashion design – a German immigrant using French materials and Italian style to invent an archetypal American product.

‘Blue Jeans’ remained workaday clothing in North America for almost a century, before taking Europe (and the rest of the world) by storm in the 1960s, a prime symbol of ‘Americanization’