by Tom Gross, European Correspondent
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An Old Pair of Jeans...
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Denim Self-Portrait
Ned McBee
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An Italian museum has put on display "the world's oldest surviving pair of jeans," much to the chagrin of Levi Strauss & Co., whose own museum in San Francisco also claims to possess the world's oldest pair of jeans.
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The Italian jeans were worn, it is said, by none other than Italy's national soldier-hero, Garibaldi. They form pride of place at a new exhibition at Rome's Museum of the Risorgimento, which commemorates the armed struggle for Italy's independence from Austrian rule in the nineteenth century. Italy's President reopened the museum in June after a 20-year restoration.
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Hero
Mary Ellen Neff
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Denim
Audrey Hall
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The exhibition's curators claim that Garibaldi wore the jeans while leading his "Red Shirts" to victory at Marsala in Sicily in 1860, a decisive battle that marked the beginning of the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel. If so, the jeans would predate the oldest known pair of Levi's, and thus seriously undermine the claim by Levi's to have invented the garment.
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Indeed, just one week before the Italian exhibition opened, other jeans, purported to be the world's oldest, went on sale. A battered pair of Levi's discovered buried in mud in a former 1880s Nevada mining town sold at an online auction for $30,000. A spokeswoman for Levi Strauss
said that these now much faded jeans, complete with rips and holes, were manufactured in Manchester, New Hampshire, between 1880 and 1885, and originally priced at $1.25. The company already had several pairs of jeans in its San Francisco museum dating from the late 1880s and 1890s.
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Reach
Ned McBee
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The Immigrant
Katja Guggenheim
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Levi's say jeans were invented in 1873, when Levi Strauss and his business partner, a fellow Jewish immigrant from Europe called Jacob Davis, patented a new process that Davis had invented. Strauss had dyed the pants blue and Davis placed rivets in them in order to strengthen points of strain, such as pocket corners and the base of the button fly, thereby preventing
ripping.
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The company acknowledges that denim pants had been used as work clothing for many years before that (in the 1850s, Levi Strauss had himself made sturdy trousers for gold miners in San Francisco out of jean material intended for wagon covers). But Levi's contends that it was the idea thought up by Davis and launched by Strauss that created what we now call jeans, "a
quintessentially American garment."
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The Ouray Miners Invade Telluride
John Boak
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Under the Bridge
Harriet Lovitt Damm
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The Italians, however, tell a rather different story. They argue that the word "jean" refers to the cloth ("jene fustian') made in the port of Genoa (known in French as Gźnes), and that "jeans" were first worn by sailors from Genoa, not by cowboys in the American West.
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Complicating matters still further, some French experts claim that jeans originated in France. They say the word "denim" derives from woven cotton cloth made in Nīmes, once known as "serge de Nīmes". Not so, say Levi's. "Serge de Nimes" was made of silk and wool, but denim has always been made of cotton; and the denim Levi's used was not from Europe but was made in New England.
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Blue Jean Jacket
Ruth Neubauer
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Jas
Diana DeSantis
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Levi's also insists that jeans only came to Europe and Asia when they were worn during off-duty hours by U.S. troops in World War II, and that they only hit the rest of the world over a decade later when they were exported as part of an American-led "lifestyle revolution." Whatever their origins, vintage jeans are now being bought for considerable sums by collectors all over the world.
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| See the archive of Tom Gross' articles. |
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