the.com/denim
the cotton armor that survived gold rushes, rock stars, and your worst decade of fashion
means A sturdy, twill-woven cotton fabric, usually dyed indigo blue and most famous as the stuff of jeans and jackets.
from The name is short for 'serge de Nîmes' — 'serge from Nîmes,' a city in southern France where a tough twill cloth was made. The phrase wore down to 'de Nîmes' and finally to 'denim.' There's a tidy companion legend that 'jeans' comes from Genoa (via French 'Gênes'), where similar cotton trousers were worn by sailors — a plausible and widely repeated story, though the fabric we now picture owes its blue to indigo and its toughness to that French twill.
- name origin
- named for Nimes, France: 'serge de Nimes'
- rivet patent
- Levi Strauss patented riveted jeans in 1873
- indigo math
- one pair takes roughly 1,800 gallons of water
- banned dress
- Soviet states once treated jeans as capitalist contraband
- miner roots
- built tough for gold prospectors, not catwalks
levi strauss 501 — iconic blue jeans created in 1873, still the best-selling jean model worldwide
raw denim selvedge — japanese mills like cone mills produce unwashed denim with sealed edges, worn by denim enthusiasts in kyoto
wrangler cowboy cut — rodeo-standard jeans worn since 1947, preferred by professional cowboys across the american west