Levi Strauss & Co.
privately held American clothing company
Levi Strauss & Co. is an American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi's brand of denim jeans. It was founded in May 1853 when German-Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss moved from New York City, New York, to San Francisco, California, to open a West Coast branch of his brothers' New York dry goods business. The corporation is registered in Delaware and its headquarters is located in Levi's Plaza in San Francisco.
History
Origin and formation (1853–1890s)
In 1858, the company was listed as Strauss, Levi (David Stern & Lewis Strauss) importers clothing, etc. 63 & 65 Sacramento St. (today, on the current grounds of the 353 Sacramento Street Lobby) in the San Francisco Directory with Strauss serving as its sales manager and his brother-in-law, David Stern, as its manager.
Jacob Davis, a Latvian-Jewish immigrant, was a Reno, Nevada tailor who frequently purchased bolts of denim cloth from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Davis's customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he thought of using copper rivets to reinforce points of strain, such as on pocket corners and the base of the button fly. Davis lacked sufficient funds to obtain a patent, so he wrote to Strauss proposing a business partnership.
The public source identifies “Levi Strauss & Co.” as privately held American clothing company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Levi, Strauss and privately.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Levi Strauss & Co.”, the useful work is to connect “privately held American clothing company” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q127962. VIAF identifies the subject as 312788469. The Library of Congress control number is n50056833. 3 of 9 selected statements include explicit references; 6 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1853 and 1858.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Levi Strauss & Co.”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Levi Strauss & Co. primary sources, Levi Strauss & Co. archive and Levi research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Levi Strauss & Co.”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Levi Strauss & Co.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.