Levis

Rancher, wearing blue jeans, in the early 1940s. The roll up cuff was extremely common at that time.

At the time I started this entry, I had just noted here a news story that every one in the US is well aware of, that being the supposed demise of Hostess and its most famous product, Twinkies.  I correctly noted in that entry that I thought the brand would be back, and was correct, but that's not the point of my entry here. Rather, this time I'll look at another major brand, which to my mind has declined over they years.  This time I'll mull over another famous brand name and product.

That product is Levis.  Or, more particularly, Levi-Strauss' signature product, the Levi's 501 jean.

In the popular imagination for those of a certain age, the Levi 501 has always been around. That's not really true, the jeans archetype actually took a real pounding in the late 1960s, when bell bottom jeans became inexplicably popular.  But they rebounded in the mid 1970s.  I can actually recall the exact moment when I knew that you could get them again here, locally.  I didn't like bell bottoms at all, but they were the only jeans you could get.  Walking one day in the hallway of the junior high I saw another student with the straight legged 501.  I went home that day and had my parents take me downtown and buy a pair.  That's probably the one and only time I ever had my parents go right out and get clothing for the reasons of "fashion.".  But I hated those bell bottoms and the 501s looked so much better.

Here, for example, is how the Levi Strauss company now conceives of those wearing its jeans, as featured on their website.  Most of these guys look like a stiff breeze would blow them over.  Heck, most of them look like they'd go running home crying due to stiff breeze and spend the rest of the day in bed watching the Lifetime Television network. What a pathetic state of affairs.  In some ways its pretty symbolic of what seems to have happened to the company, and maybe even a bit of American culture in general.

The Levis myth has the the birth of the company occurring when a California miner came in to Strauss' Sand Francisco shop and asked for a pair of trousers to be cut out of tent canvass, with Levi Strauss being that tent maker.  That's a nice myth, but it isn't really true.  Strauss operated the San Francisco branch of larger and more geographically spread mercantile firm, which sold a variety of things, including canvas and tents.  His San Francisco store was really part of a larger fine dry goods firm.  Stauss didn't really invent the iconic trousers either, but was approached Jacob Davis, a Latvian immigrant who was a tailor in the area. Davis, almost certainly not his real name, was continually buying canvas from Strauss and came up with the idea of making reinforced with rivets cotton trousers.  Davis and Strauss had another connection, although not too much can be made of it, as they were co-religious, both being immigrant who were Jewish.  Strauss, however, had been born in Bavaria, with Davis being born in Latvia. The cultural differences between the two were probably fairly pronounced.

But not so pronounced that they couldn't form a company for the new enterprise, which is what they did.  Davis was the actual patent holder, with the patent for the rivet reinforced trousers dating to 1873.  Knowing his market, the patent drafter depicted the design being worn by a miner.

Levi 501s appeared amazingly early, with the denim trousers being offered for the first time in 1890.  But, contrary to another widespread myth about them, they didn't become the trousers of the cowboy.  No cotton jean did.  Cotton jeans were the hard wear clothing of working men, engaged in heavy labor.  They appealed to the same set that buys Carhartts today.  Cowboys, in that era, wore wool trousers as a rule.  The highly accurate paintings of Remington and Russel are good illustrations of that, which if observed often shown cowboys wearing checked heavy wool trousers, or even in one instance NWMP wool breaches.

And Levi Strauss wasn't the only brand around offering blue denim trousers.  Prior to World War Two there were a variety of company's that manufactured them, with Lee, the manufacturer of Lee Rider's, being the biggest.  The brand that first popularized the idea that cowboys wore blue jeans was a brand oddly named Booger Reds, with those jeans being popular because their very dark blue color filmed well.  Levis were pretty much a West Coast item and were not well known elsewhere.

About the time that that movies started to depict cowboys as wearing jeans, the washing machine really came in, in earnest. That changed what people wore, particularly those who worked in heavy labor or dirty labor of any kind.  Before the washing machine cotton offered no advantages over wool, except that it was cooler in the summer.  By and large, the fabric people wore was wool.  The Army, a major consumer of cotton today, didn't even issue a cotton uniform for general wear until the 1930s, although it had long issued a cotton stable uniform strongly resembling modern Carhartts for quite some time prior to that.  But when washing machines came in, all that changed.  Cotton is easy to wash by machine.  Wool is not.

This is not to say that cotton wasn't worn at all.  It was, and obviously had been. Cotton was the major pre Civil War export item in the American South.  The growing and harvesting of cotton fueled slavery before the war, and the Southern states thought cotton so important, as a global commodity, that European nations would have no choice but to recognize the Confederacy as a nation.  In the odd way things go, the Southern succession actually caused the Egyptian cotton industry to boom, so cotton did not turn out to be the king that southerners believe it was, and in turn the British were more tied to Egypt, technically part of the Ottoman Empire, than ever.  Anyhow, that does demonstrate that cotton was from very early on an important textile plant, as with some other plants that can be sued for textile fibers.

Indeed "denim", the fabric that blue jeans came to be made of, had been around for eons prior to Levi Strauss ever making a pare of trousers.  While the first Levis were canvas, not denim, denim trousers had been around long enough to pick up that name from a French town which was associated with them.  They were a popular trouser with French sailors, and the French even made denim sails for ships.

And by the early 20th Century, and indeed well before that, cotton had become a popular cloth for shirts, and as we have seen, for the trousers of heavy labor. That doesn't diminish the importance of wool, which was huge, but it does show that cotton clothing of various types wasn't uncommon by any means.  Quite t he contrary.  Levis, on the other hand, weren't the only makers of blue jeans, and they weren't even the most common.

Between World War One and World War Two, blue jeans started to take off because of the introduction of the washing machine, crude and scary though they were, and the the movies.  With American households starting to turn to washing machines they started to turn more and more to cotton, although cotton didn't take over, overnight.  Cotton work clothing became increasingly common, as cotton was easy to wash.  Wool, however retained a hugely significant spot in clothing.  It remained the common cloth for most outerwear and mostly daily men's trousers, if they weren't working in some sort of dirty labor. 

Cowboying, however, is a type of dirty labor, and starting after World War One, cotton jeans came in, in a major way.  Jeans made good trousers for cowboys as they were relatively tight fitting (but not super tight, is in the Metro-sexual way Levis models now wear them)., they were relatively cheap, and they were easily washable.  That made them good clothing for ranchers and cowboys on the more modern pattern of ranch, which had fenced pastures and stable headquarters, where people generally returned to a house or bunkhouse every day.

Movies picked up on this right away, in part because a lot of early cowboy actors actually were cowboys. And jeans photographed well. The favorite jean for early movie makers was a brand called "Booger Reds", which were a deep blue, but Levis, a West Coast brand, show up as well.

Nationwide, however, Levis didn't dominate the market by any means. Probably the most common pattern of jeans, nationwide, were Lees.  Lees, like Levis, saw ranch use, and it was for that reason that Lee adopted the name Lee Riders for their jeans.  Prior to the Second World War Lee was the biggest manufacturer of jeans.

In addition to Lee, by the 1940s Levis already had a truly Ranch-centric competitor making a jean brand designed for ranch use in mind.  Lee was a fairly old company by the 1940s, but it already had a competitor in Casey Jones, a textile company which was already making a jean they sold under the name of Wranglers. Wranglers had wrangles in mind for the design, but Casey Jones didn't actually manufacture very many.  In the early 40s, however, Casey Jones was bought out by Blue Bell, a company that  manufactured overalls.  It acquired the Wrangler name, and in 1947 Blue Bell came out with the pattern of jeans still known as the 13MWZ, a pattern designed specifically for riders, and more specifically for rodeo riders.  

It was WWII that pushed Levis over the top as the dominant blue jean manufacturer.  It isn't as if nobody was making jeans going into the war, but Levis expanded enormous during the war.  Industrial work was the reason why.  So, perhaps ironically, a jean that was so commonly associated, early on, with cowboys in marking really expanded due to the industrial and heavy work during World War Two.

After the war, while it had competitors, Levis really took over as the dominant jean.  They remained, however, pretty strongly associated with physical work of one kind or another. By that time, people routinely believed that they'd always been the trousers of cowboys, which wasn't true, but they really were the trouser that most cowhands were wearing at that time.  For most people for everyday wear, however, assuming that they weren't in some physical labor, other trousers remained the norm. Wool remained pretty common in the 1950s, but cotton trousers had by that time come in pretty big as well. World War Two also caused that to occur as, while the Army was mostly clad in wool in Europe, every soldier had cotton khakis for stateside warm weather wear, and cotton combat uniforms had been introduced in varying patters in the Army everywhere.  Cotton "chinos", which were really simply the basic Army cotton khaki trouser, had come in.

In the 50s blue jeans busted out of the status of work only trousers when they became associated with rebellion. James Dean, Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin and others were all seen sporting them in films associated with 1950s rebellious youth. By the mid 1950s they were becoming the everyday wear for a generation. By the 1960s they'd completely taken over, with the Baby Boomer generation of the 1960s wearing bell bottom Levis for everything, and an older generation ahead of them wearing them a lot as well.  Colored (i.e., non blue) Levis came in as the cowboy stars of the 1930s and 40s had them made for color films of the 60s, expanding the myth that Levis were 19th Century cowboy clothing.  By the time I was in junior high and high school in the 70s and 80s, every boy wore Levis.  In the mid 70s, most girls did too, and indeed wore the same patterns as boys, except that they'd worn the new jeans into the bathtub and then out, until dry, to "shrink to fit" them to form.

So what happened to Levis?

Well, perhaps any company that becomes so dominant is bound to fall. But it is a surprising decline. By the 1970s Levis were so dominant that they'd become an item of smuggling into the Iron Curtain.  Levis were it.  Lee remained, but it had a mere fraction of the market it had once dominated.  Wranglers were there as well, but they were only worn by people who were strongly associated with agriculture, or, interestingly enough, by people who otherwise actually rode, reflecting the fact that their cut was designed for riders (white Wranglers are the trouser of professional polo players to this day).  Perhaps a market like that was doomed to be prey to students of marketing.

It came with women's jeans first.  By the late 1970s, designers were pitching new jean brands at women.  Calvin Klein comes to mind, but as pointed out in an emailed comment to a post on a companion blog of ours, locally young women turned to Rocky Mountain Jeans, a good brand pitched just at them.  Levis was slow to react, except that it started to expand into semi dress wear with "Dockers", a chino line of clothing probably reflecting that a lot of Boomers were no longer the rebels they once were.  Their market share declined.

And so, in my view, did their quality.  I still like Levis 501s and I still wear them today. But now that they're made overseas, they just aren't what they were. Sizing, for example, is inconsistent.  Wranglers are always the size they claim to be (and I wear them too).  Lees are more or less the same as they've always been. But Levis can be anything from big to small in the same sizing, and even the cloth isn't consistent. It's a sad decline of an iconic brand.

And their advertising is junk.  Rather than appealing to Hipsters, or whomever they're trying to appeal to, they'd be better off studying Wrangler whose wearers have brand loyalty.  Or perhaps they ought to study Harley Davidson, which also does.  Harley went through a rise and decline, only to recapture their market by remembering who bought them in the first place, and why.  Levis ought to ponder the same.