This is the story of a sturdy American symbol which has now spread throughout most of the world. The symbol is not the dollar. It is not even Coca-Cola. It is a simple pair of pants called blue jeans, and what the pants symbolize is what Alexis de Tocqueville called “a manly and legitimate passion for equality…. Blue jeans are favored equally by bureaucrats and cowboys; bankers and deadbeats; fashion designers and beer drinkers They draw no distinctions and recognize no classes; they are merely American 1 . Yet they are sought after almost everywhere in the world ― including Russia, where authorities recently broke up a teen-aged gang that was selling them on the black market for two hundred dollars a pair. They have been around for a long time, and it seems likely that they will outlive even the necktie.
[2] This ubiquitous American symbol was the invention of a Bavarian-born Jew. His name was Levi Strauss.
[3] He was born in Bad Ocheim, Germany , in 1829, and during the European political turmoil of 1848 decided to take his chances in New York , to which his two brothers already had emi
grated. Upon arrival, Levi soon found that his two brothers had exaggerated their tales of an easy life in the land of the main chance. They were landowners, they had told him; instead, he found them pushing needles, thread, pots, pans ribbons, yarn, scissors and buttons to housewives. For two years he was a lowly peddler, hauling some 180 pounds of sundries door-to-door to eke out a marginal living. When a married sister in San Francisco offered to pay his way West in1850, he jumped at the opportunity, taking with him bolts of canvas he hoped to sell for tenting.
[4] It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants ― sturdy pants that would stand up to the rigors of the digging ― were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned. On the spot, Strauss measured the man's girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust 2 , had [the canvas] tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. The miner was delighted with the result, word got around about “those pants of Levi's” and Strauss was in business. The company has been in business ever since.
[5]When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nimes, France ― called serge de Nimes and swiftly shortened to “denim”(the word “jeans” derives from G ê nes, the French word for Genoa, where a similar cloth was produced). Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name 3 , but it was not until the 1870s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark. The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada , tailor, Jacob W. Dacis, who added them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Alkali Ike. Alkali, the story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them with ore samples and demanded that Davis do something about it. As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the packets riveted; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated 4 and patented the gimmick ― and hired Davis as a regional manager.
[6] By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the comsort of等于什么
pany prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss has become a man of prominence in California . For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West ― cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi's jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easters returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War Ⅱ , when blue jeans were declared and essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work 5 . From a company with fifteen salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two thousand, with fifty plants and offices in thirty-five countries. Each year, more than 250,000,000 items of Levi's clothing are sold ― including more than 83,000,000 pairs of riveted blue jeans. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and demonstrable reliability, the common pants of America . They can be purchased pre-washed, pre-faded, and pre-shrunk for the suitably proletarian look. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at
the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.
[7]The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own ― so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. There was, for example 6 , the turn-of-the-century trainman who replaced a faulty coupling with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul
his car out of a ditch; the Californian who found several pairs in an abandoned mine, wore them, then discovered they were sixty-three years old and still as good as new and turned them over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to their toughness. And then there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi's belt loop through which his rope was hooked.
美国牛仔裤史话

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