40 Fun Facts About Jeans and Denim

The tiny extra pocket on Levi's jeans, a feature since the nineteenth century, was designed to protect what?

A watch was what the little pouch was built to guard, back when men carried pocket timepieces. It has since been nicknamed the frontier, coin, match and ticket pocket.

Which clothing chain began in 1969 as a single store stocking nothing but Levi's jeans and LP records?

Gap founder Don Fisher promised Levi's in every style and size under one roof, with the records there to pull in teenagers. Own-label clothes only arrived in 1974.

Which crooner, turned away from a Vancouver hotel in 1951 for wearing denim, was later given a Levi's denim tuxedo?

Bing Crosby's snub is said to be where the phrase Canadian tuxedo for double denim began. Levi's made 200 replicas of his jacket in 2014.

The word jeans comes from the French name for which port city, known for its cheap work-clothes fabric?

Genoa is Gênes in French, and from the 16th century its cotton fustian was the stuff of everyday work clothes. The trousers later took the fabric's name.

Which animals strain in vain to pull apart a pair of jeans on the trademark patch sewn onto Levi's?

Horses failing to tear the trousers apart have been Levi's trademark since 1886, chosen to symbolise the strength of its clothing. The design is known as the Two Horse trademark.

Which TV sketch show made mom jeans a household phrase with a 2003 spoof commercial for high-rise denim?

Saturday Night Live aired the fake ad in May 2003, written by Tina Fey, pitching the jeans as a Mother's Day gift. The mocking label stuck to the style.

Which pop star arrived with Justin Timberlake in matching head-to-toe denim at the 2001 American Music Awards?

Britney Spears and Timberlake's matching outfits have been called the pop-cultural peak of double denim. The all-denim look is nicknamed the Canadian tuxedo.

Which 1984 album cover shows its singer from behind in blue jeans with a baseball cap in the back pocket?

Born in the U.S.A. shows Bruce Springsteen against the stripes of an American flag in a photograph by Annie Leibovitz. The cap had belonged to a friend's late father.

What was the trade of Jacob Davis, the Reno man whose riveted work trousers became the first modern jeans?

Tailor Jacob Davis first riveted a pair for a woman who wanted work trousers tough enough for her husband, but he lacked the money to patent the idea alone. He asked his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, to share it.

The acid-wash jeans finish patented in 1986 was found by accidentally tumbling denim with stones wetted in what?

Bleach did the work in the patented process: an Italian firm had run a washing machine of jeans and dampened stones with no water added. Surfers were already fading their jeans with it in the 1960s.

Denim takes its name from which city in southern France, where weavers developed the fabric in the 17th century?

Nîmes gave the fabric its name: de Nîmes simply means from Nîmes. Its weavers had set out to imitate jean fabric and ended up with something coarser and better regarded.

Very short denim cut-off shorts are nicknamed after Daisy, played by Catherine Bach in which American TV series?

The Dukes of Hazzard made Daisy's shorts so famous that the producers had Catherine Bach wear flesh-coloured tights beneath them to get past the censors. Bach had her own doubts about wearing them.

Which US president was teased for wearing high-rise dad jeans to throw the first pitch at a baseball All-Star Game?

Barack Obama wore them to the 2009 game, and the phrase dad jeans took off as a partner to mom jeans. He later read out a tweet mocking the pair on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show.

Which metal were the rivets that reinforced the pockets of the first blue jeans, patented in 1873?

Copper rivets went in at the points of strain, such as pocket corners. Legend has it that Jacob Davis wanted the orange stitching on jeans to match them.

In which film did James Dean's blue jeans become a symbol of defiant youth for 1950s teenagers?

Rebel Without a Cause, like Marlon Brando's The Wild One two years earlier, moved jeans from workwear to a badge of youth. Greasers adopted them as a uniform.

Which teenager, the youngest model yet on Vogue's cover, fronted controversial 1980 ads for Calvin Klein jeans?

Brooke Shields was 14 when she made the Vogue cover, and the print and TV campaign followed later the same year. She had started modelling at 11 months old.

In which Gold Rush city did Levi Strauss open the dry goods business that went on to sell the first riveted jeans?

San Francisco was the commercial hub of the California gold rush, and Strauss came to run the West Coast branch of his brothers' wholesale firm, selling goods such as bedding, combs and purses.

Which lightweight volcanic rock is tumbled with jeans in a rotating drum to give them a stonewashed finish?

Pumice works like sandpaper, rubbing dye from the surface of the fabric. Importing it from Italy, Greece and Turkey grew so costly that deposits were mined in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

On carpenter jeans, the fabric loop usually stitched to the left leg was designed to carry which tool?

Hammer loops were meant to free carpenters from tool belts, yet most never use them because the tool falls out or bangs against the leg. Late-1990s hip hop made the style a fashion item.

Which jeans brand began in 1947 with a style that Rodeo Ben helped design for professional rodeo cowboys?

Wrangler jeans came from the Blue Bell company, which had rodeo champions such as Jim Shoulders test and endorse them. Rodeo Ben was Bernard Lichtenstein, a tailor who worked closely with cowboys.

Which jeans maker, founded in Kansas in 1889, introduced a zipper fly to its denim in the 1920s?

Lee began as the HD Lee Mercantile Company of Salina, and its early hit was the Union-All work jumpsuit of 1913. Its Buddy Lee dolls began as a promotional item.

Which railroad heiress put her signature and a swan logo on the back pocket of hit 1970s designer jeans?

Gloria Vanderbilt, the mother of broadcaster Anderson Cooper, put her name to jeans proposed by the Murjani Corporation in 1976. They were cut tighter than rivals and were an immediate success.

Which jeans brand, started by the four Marciano brothers in 1981, made its name with supermodel ad campaigns?

Guess campaigns gave several supermodels their first fame, and Claudia Schiffer returned for the 30th anniversary, 23 years after first posing for the label. Paul Marciano ran the image and advertising himself.

Which dye, once extracted from tropical plants and now mostly synthetic, gives classic jeans their colour?

Indigo goes mainly into denim these days, yet a single pair of blue jeans needs only 3 to 12 grams of it. The natural version comes from the leaves of Indigofera plants.

Which trouser style, adopted by navy sailors in the early 19th century, swept 1960s and 1970s jeans fashion?

Bell-bottoms can be pulled off quickly over shoes if a sailor ends up in the water. Recruits are still taught to knot the legs and fill them with air as a float.

Which Brooklyn native reached the US top 20 in 1979 with the soft-rock single Forever in Blue Jeans?

Neil Diamond took it to No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and said the song was about simple things being the ones that matter. He wrote it with his guitarist Richard Bennett.

Which Rolling Stones album arrived in a sleeve conceived by Andy Warhol showing tight jeans with a working zip?

Sticky Fingers had a real zip that opened onto a picture of white briefs. The sleeve was costly and damaged the vinyl, so later reissues carried only the photograph.

Which word, formed by combining the names of two garments, describes shorts made from denim?

Jorts squeezes jeans and shorts into one word. The name is mostly used for baggy, knee-length cut-offs, a look that drifts in and out of fashion.

What colour is the small fabric tab Levi's has stitched to the right back pocket of 501 jeans since 1936?

Red made Levi's easy to tell apart from competitors' jeans, which was the whole point of the tab. It is still sewn in the same place, and Red Tab is a registered trademark.

Which type of weave, recognisable by its diagonal ribs, gives denim one blue face and one mostly white face?

Twill passes each crosswise thread under two or more lengthwise ones, so the dyed lengthwise yarns dominate the outside of jeans. The undyed threads show on the inside.

Until 1960, what name did Levi Strauss & Co. use for the riveted denim trousers now called jeans?

Waist overalls stayed the official name of the flagship product until 1960. Its famous lot number, 501, is far older and was assigned in 1890.

Which synthetic fibre, invented by a DuPont chemist, is blended with cotton to make stretch denim?

Spandex, whose name is an anagram of expands, usually replaces only a few percent of the cotton, yet lets the fabric stretch by up to 15%. Continental Europe calls it elastane.

Levi Strauss, the merchant behind the first riveted jeans, emigrated to America at eighteen from which country?

Germany was home until 1847, when Strauss left the Bavarian village of Buttenheim with his mother and two sisters to join his brothers. The 1687 house where his life began is now a museum.

What term describes the denim woven on narrow traditional shuttle looms and associated with premium jeans?

Selvedge is the clean border made when the crosswise yarn turns back at the side of a shuttle loom, often picked out in a contrasting colour. Those looms weave fabric only about 30 inches wide.

Which designer jeans label, launched in New York in 1978, blends the first names of the three Nakash brothers?

Jordache is a contraction of Joe, Ralph and Avi, the brothers who opened a denim store before making their own form-fitting jeans. Their fortune later spread into real estate, aviation and agriculture.

Which British designer's bumster trousers of 1993 are credited with reviving low-rise jeans?

Alexander McQueen first showed the hip-skimming bumster in his Taxi Driver collection. A Kate Moss shoot for The Face that same year helped carry low-rise denim into the mainstream.

Which Los Angeles brand became a 1990s craze for ultra-wide jeans with leg openings of up to 50 inches?

JNCO is short for Judge None Choose One, and its widest styles had hems more than four feet around. The company dates back to 1985.

The 2006 protests nicknamed the Jeans Revolution, after a denim shirt was waved as a flag, shook which country?

Belarus saw the nickname take hold after police seized opposition flags at a 2005 rally and an activist raised his denim shirt in their place. Denim became a symbol of protest against President Lukashenko.

Cone Mills, once the world's largest denim maker, ran its White Oak plant in which North Carolina city until 2017?

Greensboro became a denim town when the Cone family built White Oak there in 1905, with a mill village for its workers. The plant kept weaving for 112 years.

Before settling on denim, Jacob Davis made his first riveted work trousers from which heavy fabric?

Duck canvas was the heavy cotton Davis already used for tents and wagon covers in his workshop. He was making the trousers in blue denim as well by 1871.