150 years ago, a US authority granted a patent – the birth of blue jeans. A visit to Buttenheim, the home of Löb Strauss, who was to write world history under a slightly different name.
It was 1872 when Levi Strauss received a letter from a business customer. Strauss has long since left his hometown of Buttenheim and trades in fashion items such as embroidery, stockings, socks and shoes in San Francisco, but is not averse to rounding off his range. Wouldn’t Strauss help register a patent for trousers with metal rivets? Doesn’t sound so bad, Strauss thinks, he gets in. On May 20, 1873, the responsible American authority granted patent number 139,121, it was for “improving the fastening of pocket openings”: the blue jeans were born.