Gênes

Genoese sailors in the 16th century wore trousers made from a tough cotton-and-linen blend dyed with indigo. The French called the fabric bleu de Gênes — 'blue of Genoa.' Gênes was the French name for the Italian port city, and the fabric took the city's name because that is where the sailors came from. English compressed Gênes into 'jeans' by the late 1500s.

The fabric had a rival. Serge de Nîmes — a twill weave from the southern French city of Nîmes — was a different but similar material. English shortened it to 'denim.' For centuries, jeans and denim were distinct: jeans was a Genoese cotton blend, denim was a Nîmes twill. The two fabrics merged in name and material only when American manufacturers started using them interchangeably in the 1800s.

Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant, opened a dry goods store in San Francisco in 1853 during the Gold Rush. In 1873, he and Jacob Davis, a Latvian-born tailor in Reno, Nevada, received U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for riveted denim work pants. The rivets at stress points — pocket corners, the base of the fly — were Davis's idea. Strauss had the capital. The patent made them both.

The Soviet Union restricted jeans as symbols of Western decadence. East Germans smuggled them across the border at triple the price. James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 and made them a uniform of youth defiance. By the 1980s, designer jeans from Calvin Klein and Gloria Vanderbilt cost more than suits. A sailor's work fabric became the most worn garment on earth.