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6 Surprising Facts about Your Pants

People all around the planet are forever in blue jeans, apologies to Neil Diamond.

Thomas Wolsey
6 min readJul 2, 2020

The popular pants are work clothes, protest symbols, and even gala wear. There are some things you might not know about those blue jeans, however. Tighten your belt, and keep reading.

Blue Jeans in Black & White
TDWolsey © 2020

The Double Arches

You know that nifty little double arch on the back pocket of Levis® jeans? It’s called arcuate (surprise!) stitching. Any shape that looks like a bow or arc is arcuate. More surprising than this odd word: Levis® has no idea why the stitching appears on its jeans. In 1906, the company’s headquarters burned down in the San Francisco earthquake, and with it all of Levis records went up in flames, too. Maybe Old Levi Strauss wanted to honor his hometown of Buttenheim, Bavaria with stitching across the butt. We’ll never know.

We don’t know the origin of the Arcuate stitching design. Stories about it representing the wingspread of a bird are myths; the loss of our records in 1906 makes it impossible to know why the stitching was first used. Source: Levistrauss.com

Riveting Inventions

Levis’ real innovation wasn’t work pants, though. What they did is make them tough by using rivets at all the stress points…

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Thomas Wolsey
Thomas Wolsey

Written by Thomas Wolsey

Global wanderer, Olive grove owner; Literacy and education expert. @TDWolsey www.literacybeat.com Sign up for my list https://thomas-wolsey.medium.com/subscribe

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