It is unusual that one material found its way into two countries and was called two different names.
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Yet, that’s what happened with jeans and denim.
In the 1850s a Bavarian migrant called Levi Strauss arrived in the Californian goldfields with a ready market for stout trousers, called jeans, or Levi.
The word jean was originally a type of heavy, cotton fabric, an indication that the fabric was originally manufactured in Genoa. The word was already used in England to describe hardwearing trousers made from this type of cloth.
Strauss later replaced this type of material with another type of material which he called denim and which he dyed blue.
By this time the place of manufacture was serge de nimes. The name came to be called serge denim.
Over time the trousers came to be called denim and Strauss’s trousers came to be called jeans.
Jean fustian appears in texts from the 16th century.
Medieval Latin fusteaneum is a cotton or cotton or linen fabric and gene is the modern spelling of Genoa, where it was made and shipped abroad.
The shortened form eventually made it into jean, rather than the city in which it was made.
Jeans were worn for more than 500 years. They came in different names, such as ieene, ieane, ieine and jean. The form jeanes was used until it formed jean.
In 1567 a church ordered jene fustian.
Jeana were invented by Jacob W. Davis in partnership with Levi Strauss & Co. in 1871 and patented by Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss on May 20, 1873.
Research on the trade of jean fabric shows that it emerged in the cities of Genoa, Italy, and Nîmes, France.
In Nîmes, weavers tried to reproduce jean fabric but instead developed a similar twill fabric that became known as denim.
By the 17th century, jean was a crucial textile for working-class people in Northern Italy. This is seen in a series of genre paintings from around the 17th century attributed to an artist now nicknamed The Master of the Blue Jeans.The ten paintings depict impoverished scenes with lower-class figures wearing a fabric that looks like denim. The fabric would have been Genoese jean, which was cheaper.
Dungaree was mentioned for the first time in the 17th century, when it was referred to as cheap, coarse thick cotton cloth, often coloured blue but sometimes white, worn by impoverished people in what was then a region of Bombay, India, a dockside village called Dongri.
lauriebarber,com; lbword@midcoast.com.au
