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pop design

The following in an excerpt from an upcoming book of mine about niche technical solutions and how they go pop. Let me know what you think, and Sign up for news about the book here.

Blue jeans

Blue denim jeans, often referred by the brandname Levi’s, are another example of a product with invisible secrets. Originally developed for the gold miners of California, these strong pants with riveted parts (boy have we patented it! in 1873) turned into a mainstay of current fashion.

Blue jeans are an example of a product that started off as a niche technical solution. They needed to withstand the abrasion and wear from heavy labour in sand and dirt, often while wet, with the wearer kneeling or crouching for hours each day. So the question arises; why did this specialist work-wear become a fashion standard worn globally by the average and elite? After all, you see people wearing jeans in the fanciest restaurants and one the catwalk. And just why are they blue? To answer that, we need to go back in time.

Denim has a thick and interwoven (ahem) history, as fabric weavers in Europe copied and competed to make a durable fabric weave. It’s not clear, but to quote wikipedia:

‘Gênes, the French word for Genoa, may be the origin of the word "jeans”.

Blue jeans might be seen as one of America’s great exports, but it was actually a poor Latvian immigrant who came up with the idea to reinforce the fabric with copper rivets. After all, denim is strong, but it still relies on stitching to hold it together. “The secratt of them Pents is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots,” Davis wrote in a letter to Strauss, with spelling that would make a lolcat proud.

Slate.com writes

“Jacob Davis, a Latvian immigrant, was a Reno, Nevada tailor who frequently purchased bolts of denim cloth from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Davis's customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Davis did not have the money needed to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they go into business together.”

Davis and Strauss did go in to business. They were not the first to use the blue denim fabric, and it had in fact been used for many types of clothing, including pants, before—all got called ‘blue jeans’. But arguable Levi Strauss and Co. were the ones to cement into permanence the idea that ‘blue jeans’ means blue denim pants.

But why is the blue denim, blue?

Of course, even in those days, natural dyes covered a range of colours. But because the denim weave is so thick, colouring it with most natural dyes of the time would result in stiff pants, which were uncomfortable to work in. As dye-soaked fabric dried, it hardened and became rigid. Imagine trying to crouch all day at the creek, panning for gold, wearing pants made of carpet.

But there is an ink that Europeans called Indigo, which derives its name from the latin for ‘India’ — the source of the dye in Europe. We’ve been using this dye for literally millenia, at least as far back as a sample dated at 4000 years old from Peru. For the best results, it comes from the leaves of a plant, funnily enough, called indigo. And it has a special chemical quality:

Most dyes will permeate fabric in hot temperatures, making the color stick. The natural indigo dye used in the first jeans, on the other hand, would stick only to the outside of the threads…” - Readers Digest

Dyeing it in indigo—which only colours the outside of the thread—results in a coloured fabric that is still soft and comfortable. And over time, the dye slowly washes out, taking some of the thread with it, making for even softer and more comfortable pants.

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This has been an excerpt from an upcoming book of mine. Sign up for news about the book here