Denim’s name is a contraction. Serge de Nîmes — a sturdy cotton-twill weave produced in the French city since the 17th century — was contracted, in English merchant catalogues, first to serge denim and then simply to denim. The fabric itself, though, arrived in America from Italy: specifically, from the port of Genoa, where the English rendering of the city’s French name Gênes became, by 1795, jeans.

Two fabrics, in other words, and two geographies, arguing over a single trouser.

1873

The decisive moment was in 1873, when a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis filed, with the San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss, a patent for trousers reinforced at the stress points with copper rivets. The patent was granted on May 20 of that year. The workwear industry, and eventually much of the 20th-century wardrobe, dates to that morning.

“

I have never seen a garment travel so far, from so specific a beginning, while still carrying the marks of where it came from. — Alexandra Palmer, curator, Royal Ontario Museum

The Crossover

For seventy years, denim was occupational. Miners, farmers, railway workers. It crossed into leisure slowly — through the dude ranches of the 1930s, where Eastern tourists bought Levi’s as part of the cowboy costume — and into youth culture rapidly, after The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). By 1958, several American schools had banned denim on the grounds that it encouraged delinquency.

They were, in their way, correct.

The Present Tense

Contemporary denim is, statistically, the most-worn garment on earth. The average American owns seven pairs of jeans; the Japanese selvedge-denim resale market generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually; Levi Strauss’s 1873 patent has, through legal channels and expiration, been extended into every mass-market wardrobe on the planet.

What began in a Genoese dock has been naturalised, in every country, as a local garment. That is a remarkable career for a twill.