Jeans

Jeans are popular all over the world-millions of people wear them every day.

Levi Strauss- a name that is now famous-was the man who invented jeans. Levi Strauss was born in Germany in 1829, but went to the USA as a young man. At the first he lived in New York, but in 1853 he moved to San Francisco, where he worked with his brother. They worked in a shop selling clothes to men who were looking for gold in the California Gold Rush. The men were working very hard in difficult conditions, and they needed very strong trousers. 

 Many kinds of jeans 

Strauss was the first man to begin producing special, strong trousers for working men. He made these trousers from a fabric called ‘denim’- a tough fabric that probably came from a town called Nimes in France. Many people now think the English word ‘denim’ comes from the French ‘de Nimes’, which means from ‘from Nimes’. Later, Strauss added special metal buttons to the trousers to make them  even better and they and they immediately became very popular. 

In the early part of the 20^th century, only working men wore jeans in workplaces like factories. But after the Second World War, teenage boys and young men at college started to wear them to go out. These boys called the trousers ‘jeans’. In the 1960s, more young Americans started wearing them as informal, casual clothes outside the workplace and denim jeans became fashionable. In the 1960s and 1970s, ‘decorated denim’ became very popular. These are jeans decorated with sequins, beads, colours and patterns.

  

At that time, jeans were usually flared , but today, there are many different styles of jeans; straight, baggy, flared, low-waisted- almost any style you can imagine. 

 

Today, millions of people wear jeans to go work in offices, as well as to go out. Jeans are as popular today as they ever were.