STANDARDS

CCSS: 6.SP.B.4, 6.SP.B.5, 7.SP.B.3, 8.SP.A.1, MP1, MP5, MP6

TEKS: 6.12A, 6.12B, 6.12C, 6.12D, 6.13A, 7.6G, 7.12A, 8.5C, 8.11A

The Skinny on Jeans

When tailor Jacob Davis made the world’s first pair of jeans in 1870, he had no idea they would become the most popular piece of clothing of all time. A woman came into his shop in Reno, Nevada, and asked Davis to make a sturdy pair of pants for her husband to wear to work. She was tired of fixing rips and tears in his canvas pants. 

Up for the challenge, Davis looked at what he had on hand. He had some copper rivets left over from attaching straps to horse blankets. Davis used the rivets to reinforce the pants’ points of stress, such as the corners of the pockets and below the fly. He sold 200 more pairs over the next 18 months, including some made of the tough fabric denim. Knowing he was onto something, Davis partnered with a businessman whose name is now synonymous with jeans: Levi Strauss.

Denim and jean used to be considered different fabrics. Denim was more expensive and more durable, making it popular among hard laborers. Jean fabric was often thinner and more suitable for office work or recreational wear. But by the 1960s, young people started wearing denim pants. This crowd tended to call their pants “jeans,” and the name stuck.

Today, denim jeans can be found in hundreds of colors, fits, and styles. Find out more about the world’s obsession with jeans with our charts and graphs.

Answer the following questions using the information in the charts and graphs above. Record your work and answers on our answer sheet.

Which of the following companies made the most expensive pair of jeans?

A) Escada

B) D&G

C) Forever 21

D) Gucci

About what percent of Italians say they love to wear denim?

A) 43%

B) 55%

C) 60%

D) 79%

In what year on the graph did women first own more pairs of jeans than men?  

A) 2000

B) 2005

C) 2010

D) 2015

About how much money did women around the world spend on boyfriend jeans in 2015?

A) $1.7 billion

B) $2.2 billion

C) $2.7 billion

D) $3.3 billion

About how many times more expensive are the hand-embroidered jeans from D&G than a pair of distressed jeans from Forever 21?

A) 25 times

B) 36 times

C) 45 times

D) 57 times

About how many pairs of jeans did the average man in the U.S. own in 2010?

A) 6

B) 7

C) 8

D) 9

Germany’s population is about 82.6 million people. How many Germans love denim?

How many pairs of jeans did the average American woman own in 2015? What type would you expect her to own? Why?

What are three different combinations of jeans in the chart that you could buy with $350? 

Poll the class on how many pairs of jeans each student owns. What graph would you use to represent this data? Draw it! 

Skills Sheets (1)
Lesson Plan (1)
Text-to-Speech