One hundred and thirty years ago, the Californian gold rush was in full swing and Jacob Davis was busy in his tailor’s shop fixing the pockets on miners’ cotton trousers, which kept coming away at the seams. Then Jacob had the idea of putting metal rivets in the seams to make them more hard-wearing. Seeing the potential in his invention, but lacking the money for a patent, Jacob asked a business friend who owned a San Francisco haberdashery to finance it. Loeb Strauss agreed, changed his name to Levi, and the world’s biggest clothing company was born.

Waist overalls, as they were then known, might have remained an unsung staple of workwear had it not been for the growing film industry further down the Californian coast. The huge popularity of Westerns in the 1930s implanted images of denim-clad cowboys on the public consciousness and jeans became the off-duty uniform of the working man. The fashion spread as US servicemen wore theirs abroad during the Second World War, and rebellious teen-agers cottoned on to the style after seeing James Dean’s on-screen posturing.

Drainpipes and flares, ripped or baggy, jeans have adorned the youth fashions of successive generations. Sweatshop labour made jeans cheaper and designer labels took them upmarket, challenging established names such as Levi’s, Lee and Wrangler for a share of blue denim’s multi-billion dollar business.

Then, in the 1990s, the bottom fell out of the market. Levi’s closed factories and laid off thousands of workers. It seemed that, having been prewashed and stonewashed, the 20th century’s favourite trousers were plain washed up. But just when it looked as if jeans were on their last legs, Levi’s “engineered” jeans rescued denim’s fading popularity.

After all, for durability, few items of clothing can match a pair of jeans. An 1880 pair of Levi’s was sold last year for $46,000 (pound;32,000). And if the man whose patented rivets still held them together had had a few dollars more we would all be calling them Jacob’s.

Harvey McGavin