In 1853, Levi Strauss was running a successful dry goods business in San Francisco, USA. At the same time a lot of gold mines were discovered in San Francisco and the scenario was aptly called the "California Gold Rush".
Due to a population rush to these goldmines, lot of businesses moved to San Francisco and the city was growing very wealthy. Levi wanted to take advantage of the large working crowd in the gold mines and was wondering what he could sell them.
Levi found out that there was not a big market for tents and car covers and so he designed "overalls" out of the thick and rugged tent cloths. He felt that the clothing will protect mine workers who worked close to mother earth. Soon, the blue waist overalls became a huge hit and denim cloth replaced tent canvas. In 1890, the lot number 501 was used to represent Levi overalls and metal buttons were fixed to it to improve longevity!
In 1960s, the denim overall was rechristened as Jeans(blue in French). So, that's the story of the blue Denim Levi Jeans!
PS: We seem to hype a lot of other stuff such as buffet and pizzas.
Friday Buffet - Can be left over food from the whole week.
Pizza - was a bread used to test the hotness of an oven or furnace!
2 comments:
Denim originated independently in France and India. You might want to go through this paper: Chemistry of Blue Jeans: Indigo Synthesis and Dyeing. As a kid, I read about denim being first used by mine workers but I don't remember the details now. However, there is a good record of the history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeans#History
Could you please share your source of the information regarding pizza? AFAIK, the history of pizza is not accurately known. There is a detailed entry on this in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_pizza.
My source is a biography(pocket book series) on Levi Strauss. I read about pizza in an article in the Hindu.
Thanks Susam for all the links. Will read them and update my post if needed.
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