word·nerd·dot·net
We all know the original indigo cotton work pants were made by Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant who went west with bolts of canvas to make tents but found a much more lucrative market selling sturdy, durable canvas pants and overalls to toothless prospectors with scraggly white beards and battered hats. He founded his company in 1853 as a western branch of his family's New York dry-goods store; 20 years later, Strauss and a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis began reinforcing the pants with copper rivets, and a thousand miners rolled their packs of Luckies into their t-shirt sleeves and strode into the sunset looking "cool." (Actually, that word wouldn't be appropriated to describe the with-it and rebellious for another 80 years or so. So just pretend.)
But Strauss didn't call them jeans, even though the word was in use from at least 1843 (English novelist Robert Smith Surtees’ Handley Cross contains the first reference to pants called jeans, far from the dusty mining camps of Califor-ni-ay). In the late 19th Century jean denoted not a garment but a type of fabric, a strong cotton twill called jean fustian as far back as the 1500s. The term jean comes from Janne, the Old French name for Genoa, the Italian city where the cloth was first woven.
Denim also has geographic roots; it comes from serge de Nimes, the French town that produced a tightly woven wool-silk blend. There is some controversy over whether the modern cotton denim has anything at all to do with the actual serge de Nimes but can't we all just get along?
According to the Levi’s site, denim and jean were two different fabrics, with denim being the sturdier of the two. The words are used interchangeably now.
Anyway the pants, which went from work clothes to fashion statement in the 1930s following the popularity of various jeans-clad silver-screen cowboys, were called waist overalls. Catchy, no? They were often dubbed Levi’s after about 1940, when the company began selling them nationwide. (Side note: Strauss changed his name to Levi after moving to America. If he hadn’t, we might all be wearing Loeb’s.)
After a transitional stint as jeans pants, they finally came to be known as jeans in the 1950s. Can you imagine life without them?
Other sources:
Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto
Made in America, Bill Bryson
Well, during WWII when fabric and metal were being rationed, the Levi company cut out all of the extras. Things like rivets, pocket flaps, etc were given the flick.
As it turned out people liked the fact that they could sit down on their nice furniture and not have the metal on the back pockets scratching things up.
So after the war was over a lot of the extras were added back on but NOT the rivets on the back pockets.
Go figure.
-TOA (who knows way too much about denim!)