It was 1872 in Reno, Nevada and Jacob Davis was worried. The Latvian-Jewish tailor had previously made mostly functional items, such as wagon covers and horse blankets for the workers on the Central Pacific Railroad. But this had all changed two years earlier after a visit from a woman requesting a new product: strong waist overalls, or work pants in modern English. They were for her husband, who worked as a woodcutter.

Davis purchased bolts of a heavy woven fabric, cotton duck, from a wholesaler. Then he began stitching. The pants were comfortable and loose-fitting, with a number of thoughtful details. He added plenty of pockets, including a little one at the front for stashing your watch. The weaker points were reinforced with copper rivets, the kind he usually used to fasten straps to horse blankets.

They were a raging success and soon Davis started making them in blue denim, too. His “reinforced jeans” were extraordinarily durable, gradually fading but never breaking. He literally could not make enough of them. He needed a patent, fast.

The buttons that lie to us

The incredible material under our noses

The earpiece that could save lives

He couldn’t afford one on his own, and instead sought help from his wholesaler. Together they received a patent in 1873. The wholesaler’s name? Levi Strauss & Co. Today they make around 20 million pairs every year.

But despite this stratospheric success, the garment has barely changed. Jeans of all brands still have antiquated watch pockets, now too small to be useful, while fake copper rivets – a technology made obsolete by modern stitching methods – adorn the seams. Most bizarrely of all, the battered, worn-down look of jeans worn by generations of miners, cowboys, farmers and woodcutters is painstakingly faked before they’ve left the factory.