Denim is a type of durable fabric that is made primarily of cotton. This fabric is well known throughout the world because it is used to make the popular jeans, as well as other clothing accessories.
Elaboration process
The machinery of the textile industry converts this cotton into threads. Later these threads are dyed blue with a dye known as indigo. In the next phase they are glued to make them more resistant.
On the loom, the bluish threads are crossed with others of white color and for this reason this combination is called denim. Various treatments are applied to the mixed yarns: machines that clean the fabric, application of air currents to make the fabric flexible, stretching process, etc.
All these steps make cotton definitively transform into a new fabric, denim.
Origin of the term and a brief history of the Levi Strauss jeans brand
The word denim comes from French and refers to a fabric that was already used in the Middle Ages to make resistant fabrics. This fabric came from one of the most important French cities in the textile sector, the city of Nimes. In this way, the term denim means precisely that it comes from Nimes.
In the 19th century in California, many of its inhabitants were dedicated to the mining sector, especially to the search for gold. The gold rush attracted thousands of people from all over the world. In this context, a young man named Levi Strauss, a Jewish cloth merchant of German origin, arrived in California.
Levi Strauss had a great idea: add copper rivets to the denim and incorporate a fly and pockets in the front and turn it into pants
In a short time, this resistant garment became very popular among miners and cowboys and came to be called jeans or jeans.
A few years later, a red leather patch was added to the new model of pants on the back with the number 501, which represented the manufacturing batch number.
Consequently, the jean is the garment and the denim is the fabric used in the manufacture of said garment. Levi Strauss brand jeans are a fashion icon. Its international popularity began with the western genre from the 1940s with actors such as John Wayne, Robert Mitchum or Randolph Scott. Around 1965, hippies incorporated jeans as a fundamental part of their clothing.
Photos: Fotolia-fabrika/goir
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