Nearly everyone owns a pair of jeans, but how many of us know why our pockets have those tiny metal buttons?
Known as ‘rivets’, they are placed on areas of the jeans that are most likely to be pulled apart by strain or movement and help hold the fabric together, thereby making them last longer.
It sort of makes sense when you think about where they are placed.
The jean king came up with the idea when he heard miners complaining about how quickly their pants wore out.
In the 1870s, laborers wore denim as they worked but the physical labor caused their trousers to fall apart quickly.
Consequently, a laborer’s wife went to Jacob Davis, a tailor, and asked if he could create a pair of denim work trousers that would not disintegrate so easily.
Davis came up with the idea of putting rivets on the areas that endured the most strain, such as pocket corners and the base of the fly. The rivets helped hold the fabric together, and meant the trousers were less likely to tear.