Blue jeans are patented

Tailor Jacob Davis and merchant Levi Strauss received a patent for work pants reinforced with copper rivets. They became known as blue jeans.

Context

Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, began putting metal rivets at stress points such as pocket corners after a customer's wife asked for tougher work trousers for her husband. Davis lacked the money for a patent application, so he wrote to his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss in San Francisco, who agreed to pay the fees and share in the business.

US Patent No. 139,121 was granted on May 20, 1873. The patent covered the use of rivets to reinforce pockets and the base of the button fly, not the idea of denim trousers themselves, since denim work clothes already existed. Davis moved to San Francisco to manage production, and the company began making what it called waist overalls.

The patent expired in 1890, after which other manufacturers could use rivets. The company's best-known style, later designated the 501, became a symbol of American workwear and then of casual fashion. The story that Strauss invented jeans himself is a simplification, since the invention is credited to Davis and the business partnership to both men.

Original riveted work pants from the nineteenth century are now collectors' items, and surviving pairs are held in museums and archives.