Jeans lovers across the world celebrate May 20 as the day when Levi Strauss and his partner, Jacob Davis, first received their patent for riveted jeans. This happened in 1873, and today jeans are celebrated for their fashion and for their function too. While there are only a few parts of the world where jeans are not worn, like rural areas in Southern Asia, most everyone else on the planet has at least a few pairs of these jeans in their closets.
Largely, people today have designer jeans that either are whiskers jeans, coated jeans, colored jeans, rhinestone jeans and glitzy jeans, though there are some normal fit and traditional slim fit jeans for women thrown in there too. The typical American woman wears a size 12 jeans, but when she gets into slim fit jeans that are just her size, she feels an instant boost to her ego because jeans have always had the capacity to make people look better. Even jeggings, which were added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary’s 12th edition in 2011, are snatched up by women wanting to look and feel better. Whiskers jeans do this too, hugging a woman’s curves and making her feel great about herself. Jeans may originally have be coined by the French for their name for Italian Genoan sailors who would wear the cotton twill trousers, but today Americans have largely taken over with everything from whiskers jeans to designer ones. Today, jeans are very much an American staple.