Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, fixed the weak corners of work trousers with copper rivets he normally used on horse-blanket straps. According to Nevada Magazine, he couldn’t afford the $68 patent fee, so in 1872 he wrote to his cloth supplier, Levi Strauss, offering to share the rights. The patent came through on 20 May 1873.

The rivets worked almost too well. Levi’s says customers kept writing in because the back-pocket rivets scratched saddles, cars and furniture. In 1937 it sewed denim over them and stuck notices on the pockets so buyers knew the rivets were hidden, not gone.

The Rivet’s Still ThereLevi’s pocket notice, 1937

In 1966 the hidden rivets were wearing through the cloth, and Levi’s swapped them for bar tacks.

Hamilton Carhartt started making work clothes in 1889 with two sewing machines. His first product was a heavy bib overall for railway men, designed after he talked to railway workers about what they needed.

The cotton slump of the 1920s and the Great Depression cut the company back to three plants. It is still family-owned today.

Then came the 1990s. Rap and hip-hop groups wore Carhartt in their videos, and according to Encyclopedia.com, demand ran so far ahead of supply in 1993 that the firm turned down accounts from department and specialty store chains to keep its working customers supplied.

Two more Detroit firms made overalls for working men. Larned, Carter & Co. sold Headlight overalls to engine crews, with adverts asking: “Have you bought that first suit of Headlights yet?” In January 1914 a Nebraska shop won the firm’s national window-display prize with a railway semaphore sign reading “Stop; buy your Headlight overalls now”. The prize was a $25 draft.

Across town, W.M. Finck & Co. sold its overalls on the toughness of a pig’s snout. Every button carried a pig’s head between the words “FINCK” and “DETROIT”.

Wear Like a Pigs NoseFinck’s slogan, Detroit

In 1960 Carhartt bought Crown Headlight, which by then owned the Headlight name, along with Finck, its old employee’s firm. The pig was retired.

A lot of the workwear Americans wore didn’t come from a famous maker. It came out of the Sears, JCPenney and Montgomery Ward catalogues, under labels the stores owned.

Penney registered BIG MAC for men’s cotton work shirts in 1922. According to History.com, a McDonald’s franchisee in Pennsylvania put a double-decker burger of the same name on sale in 1967. So for 45 years, a Big Mac was a work shirt. Sears had its own work label, Hercules, which ran until around 1965.

Both names have turned up again in Japan. According to Houyhnhnm, Big Mac came back for the Japanese market from autumn/winter 2019. According to ZOZO Fashion Tech News, the Okayama denim maker JOHNBULL launched a new label inspired by the old Sears one for spring/summer 2025.

Cone’s White Oak plant in Greensboro, North Carolina, started weaving in April 1905. According to Textile World, by the end it made “the last selvage denim made in the United States”. It closed in 2017, and about 200 jobs went with it.

According to Michiya Suzuki, general manager of Red Wing Japan, the boots first appeared in Japan in 1976. In the mid-1990s the Japan team wanted the 875 moc toe in black leather. Back in Minnesota, nobody at a work-boot company could see the point. Suzuki calls the black 875 the turning point for the Japanese boom.

But the Japan team did itMichiya Suzuki, Red Wing Japan

Some American names now belong to Japanese companies outright. In July 2012 ABC-Mart agreed to buy LaCrosse Footwear, Danner’s parent, for about $138 million, and the Portland boots are still made in Portland. Others were brought back from the dead: Big Yank, dormant since the 1980s, was revived by the Tokyo label 35 Summers.