Levi's and You

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Every day millions of people put on their durable denim jeans without thinking where they came from or how they got there. When in fact those jeans have had had quite the controversial journey. There are two billion jeans produced annually according to the Environmental Justice Foundation and your pair is one of them. How many gallons of water, fertilizer and chemicals do you think went into them ? These are questions that make many of us cringe and they are questions that need to be answered. The production of these jeans is such an intimately global event that we all play different roles in their production and consumption. So now lets take a deeper look at where those Levi’s really came from and see how global it really is.

Jeans have quite a history starting with the one and only Levi Strauss, he was a shopkeeper in San Francisco which at the time was a rapidly expanding city in the 1800’s. The gold rush was on and everybody was traveling to California to strike gold of their own. The Miners clothes had to endure very harsh conditions of cold, rocky and muddy conditions, standard clothes of the day were not quite getting the job done. The cotton twill pants which were standard for the time were uncomfortable and always ripped very easily around the pockets under the stress of mining and tough labor. Jacob Davis, a tailor came up with the idea of using copper rivets instead of stitching the points where the jeans encountered the most stress. The pockets were riveted with copper fasteners to prevent them from tearing from the wear of mining. This very unique feature was a huge success with the miners and hard workers of the time and his denim jeans and overalls sold very well.

The labor involved in making jeans has drastica...

... middle of paper ...

... then a monetary price tag on these jeans we have to account for the human cost as well.

Works Cited

Moseley, William G., and Leslie Gray. Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization, and Poverty in Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2008. Print.

11 ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 619. (Summer, 2005 ): 9374 words. LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 2014/04/10.

"House of Denim Towards a Brighter Blue; Promoting Sustainable Denim from Crop to Shop." Apparel Online. (February 6, 2014 ): 1351 words. LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 2014/04/10.

"Levi's®." History & Heritage. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

"The True Cost of "Made in the USA" Levi's? $178." GlobalPost. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

EJF. (2007). The deadly chemicals in cotton. Environmental Justice Foundation in collaboration with Pesticide Action Network UK: London, UK. ISBN No. 1-904523-10-2.

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