Monday, 8 January 2007

Jeans

Jeans


This is Tze Meng clanging to Leslie's back. Leslie must have had a bad back ache after that. It was also taken during the last EAP class where both of them got high and start piggy backing. The photo was processed as to leave the deep blue jeans coloured white the rest black and white. Most of the people around the college wears jeans as daily outfit.


Jeans are trousers traditionally made from denim, but may also be made from a variety of fabrics including corduroy. Originally work clothes, they became popular among teenagers starting in the 1950s. Historic brands include Levi's and Wrangler.

Jeans were first created in Genoa, Italy when the city was an independent republic and a naval power. The first were made for the Genoese Navy because it required all-purpose trousers for its sailors that could be worn wet or dry, and whose legs could easily be rolled up to wear while swabbing the deck. These jeans would be laundered by dragging them in large mesh nets behind the ship, and the sea water would bleach them white.

In the 1850s Levi Strauss, a German dry goods merchant living in San Francisco, was selling blue jeans under the "Levi's" name to the mining communities of California. One of Strauss's customers was Jacob Davis, a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth from the Levi Strauss & Co wholesale house. After one of Davis's customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn trousers, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Davis did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they both go into business together. After Strauss accepted Davis's offer, on May 20, 1873, the two men received patent #139,121, a patent for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings", from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Initially, blue jeans were simply sturdy trousers worn by workers, especially in the factories during World War II. During this period, men's jeans had the zipper down the front, whereas women's jeans had the zipper down the right side. By the 1960s, both men's and women's jeans had the zipper down the front. In the United States during the 1950s, wearing of blue jeans by teenagers and young adults became symbolic of mild protest against conformity. Some movie theaters and restaurants refused to admit patrons who wore blue jeans. During the 1960s the wearing of blue jeans became more acceptable and by the 1970s had become a general fashion in the United States.

(courtesy of wikipedia.com)

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