Levi's Women's Jeans History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Women's jeans, this history begins, have evolved substantially in the 75 years since Levi Strauss & Co. created the first pair - but at their core, modern women's jeans trace their lineage back to the earliest pairs, and today's most popular styles are interpretations of the daring and progressive styles first made popular in the 1930s. The prehistory is borrowing: before 1934, women in the West began wearing their husbands' or brothers' Levi's 501 jeans, the historical record blue jeans first created in 1873, because the pants were sturdy enough to handle the rough life of a rancher. Those borrowed 501s foreshadow, the filing says, the current Boyfriend jeans popular today - a men's fit worn by women first as necessity, generations later as style.

Dude Ranches, Rebellion and the Slim Jean

Demand arrived through tourism. In the 1930s and 1940s, sales of women's jeans began to take off due to the growing popularity of dude ranches, and high-end department stores Best & Co. and H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Company carried Levi's jeans to meet the new demand; women's jeans also switched from button-fly to zipper in that period. In the 1950s Lady Levi's jeans were sold throughout the United States alongside men's 501 jeans and the classic denim jacket - the ranch garment become national wardrobe. Then the meaning changed: amid the tumultuous cultural revolution of the 1960s, denim became a staple in women's wardrobes and jeans became an icon of rebellion adopted by both men and women; the brand introduced a slimmer fitting jean, the precursor to the modern Skinny jean, and stretch women's jeans became popular among teenage girls.

The 1970s entries are range and geography: the women's range offers a variety of fashion fits including full and straight leg jeans and jean cuffs, flares and bell-bottoms become popular styles, and Levi's jeans for women are introduced for the first time overseas. A garment line born for Western ranch work in 1934 is, forty years on, an exported fashion range with silhouette variety as its selling point. The historical record's photographs - including patent imagery and vintage women's jeans pictures kept from the page - are carried in the gallery on the history page by reference, exactly as they appeared.

The Women's 501, Stonewash and Super Low

The 1980s reverse the founding borrowing: in 1981 the Levi's brand introduces the famous 501 jeans for women - the men's original now made as a women's product in its own right - and introduces stonewashing to women's jeans just two years later, in 1983. The 1990s are summarised as a series of premium denim and a wide range including the 501, 550 and 512 Slim fits. In 2002 the brand launched Super Low jeans for women, driving the trend, the filing says, to new heights. Each decade's entry pairs a fit with a cultural position: work, rebellion, fashion range, the borrowed original reclaimed, and finally the low-rise extreme.

The page's framing summary is dated September 2009: Levi Strauss & Co. is one of the world's largest branded apparel companies and the global leader in jeanswear, marketing products in more than 110 countries, designing and marketing jeans, casual wear and related accessories for men, women and children under the Levi's, Dockers and Signature brands, with fiscal 2008 net revenues of $4.4 billion reported. In September 2009 the company celebrated the 75th anniversary of women's jeans - the anniversary this history was written to mark. The historical record also appends the cluster's later notes on the 501 CT of 2014, the 700 and 300 Series of 2015 and the 720 High-Rise Super Skinny of 2018, kept here with their years. Use this page for the women's line only; the founder, the company timeline and the Tab pages file different facts, and for current women's ranges the official Levi's site in the References is the authority.

Photos

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