25 Brutal Truths About the People Who Really Made Levi's

25 Brutal Truths About the People Who Really Made Levi's Everyone knows the name on the label. Almost nobody knows the names of the people who sewed the pants. July 1873. A company on Market Street in San Francisco advertises for fifty women to sew its new riveted overalls. There is one condition: each woman has to bring her own sewing machine. Those pants became blue jeans, the most famous piece of clothing on earth. We count down twenty-five documented truths, using the company's own published timeline as the spine. The Reno tailor who really had the idea. The patent. The women at the machines. The 1906 fire, when the company kept paying its people. Annie Heinzer, who sewed pockets for $1.65 a day and taught two future company presidents to sew. The arcs painted by hand in wartime. The plants that closed. And the two years the company's official history leaves out. Sources and Further Reading Levi Strauss & Co., "Levi Strauss & Co. Timeline" (2014 Tracey Panek (LS&Co. historian), "A Look Back at the Women Factory Workers of Levi Strauss & Co." (2018): Levi Strauss & Co., "Back to School at LS&Co.'s Oldest Sewing Facility" (2017), on 250 Valencia Street Heddels, "When Levi's Was 'The Only Kind Made by White Labor'" (2021), citing M. A. Harris, Jeans of the Old West NPR, "A pair of Levi's that sold for $76K reflects anti-Chinese sentiment of 19th century" (October 14, 2022) 00:00 July 1873: bring your own machine 00:38 25. The man on the label 01:46 24. The woodcutter's wife 02:50 23. A letter, and a promise kept 03:39 22. Patent No. 139,121 04:31 21. Bring your own machine 05:24 20. They can't be ripped 06:04 19. 180 and 38 07:15 18. The only kind 08:04 17. 501 08:29 16. The merchant's will 09:01 15. April 18, 1906 10:00 14. 250 Valencia Street 10:45 13. The cloth from New Hampshire 11:38 12. White Oak 12:25 11. The first line 13:08 10. $1.65 a day 14:22 9. The short week 15:00 8. The cowboy 16:13 7. The painted arcs 17:22 6. Integrated 17:58 5. The teenagers renamed them 18:56 4. The pair in the mud 19:29 3. 1990 20:27 2. The last stitch 21:41 1. The two missing years Visual Sources Photographs and prints from the Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives, the Getty Museum, Brigham Young University and other collections, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0 and CC BY-SA; full list on request). Lewis W. Hine's photographs of the Amoskeag and White Oak mills (National Child Labor Committee, 1909–1912) show those mills, not Levi's workers. Motion-picture footage: A Trip Down Market Street (Miles Brothers, 1906); San Francisco earthquake and fire films (1906, Library of Congress); California Cotton Mills, Oakland (1924); Work Pays America (WPA, 1937); The Plow That Broke the Plains (U.S. Resettlement Administration, 1936) — all public domain, identified on screen. The 1924 and 1937 sewing rooms are not Levi's factories. Illustrated scenes are original illustrations made for this documentary; they are not historical photographs and do not depict any named person. Original presentation: Workworn America. About This Channel This video is made for educational and informational purposes. Workworn America explores American industrial and working-class history through historical sources, with references and further reading listed above. The company's own records are quoted as the company's account. This channel has no connection with Levi Strauss & Co. Corrections and firsthand accounts are welcome — especially from Valencia Street, San Antonio and Cone Mills families. Did someone in your family sew, weave or cut cloth for a living — at Levi's, at Cone, at Amoskeag or at any plant in America? Tell us the plant, the job and the year in the comments. Subscribe for more history through the lives of American workers. #americanhistory #levis #madeinusa Which surprised you more: that the women had to bring their own sewing machines, or the two years missing from the company's own timeline? If your mother, grandmother or anyone in your family worked a sewing line, tell me where and when. I read every one.