Everybody who wears jeans sometimes wonders why these metal buttons are fitted on the jeans. When they don’t seem to have a purpose, most people ignore them as decoration or design. But actually, it is something without which the concept of jeans is impossible.
These metal buttons are the main reason for the strength of the jeans, and if they are not, the pants will torn apart from being pierced in places. About 150 years ago, workers wore denim trousers for their routine labor times.
The cloth was relatively strong but often tore during hard labor. One worker’s wife was so upset by the problem that she went to Jack Davis, a well-known tailor, and asked him to make pants for her husband that would not tore easily.
After some deliberation, Jacob decided to fasten metal buttons on the most pressed parts of the pants. He assessed the most affected parts while working, getting up, sitting, and walking, and applied metal buttons to them. Jacob’s experiment was very successful, and he soon had rows of workers making special trousers.
In those days the Levi’s Strauss Company supplied denim cloth to the tailor Jacob. In collaboration with this company, Jacob introduced a new type of pants design on a commercial level and thus the strongest pants in the world came into being. Jeans name was not used for these pants in those days. Almost a century after denim metal button-down trousers began to be called jeans.
Levi Strauss, the German immigrant owner of denim jeans brand Levi’s never wore the jeans (or pants) that his company made because initially the jeans were made exclusively for working and lower-middle class people and he belonged to a business family. Also, Levis is the first company to manufacture riveted blue jeans whereas the other brands are just copying their style/produce.