The Facts About Those Levi’s Myths

Each Levi’s dealer has his own trade secrets for identifying and dating jeans and jackets . . . and most of them are wrong. “There’s so much misinformation about our history, it makes me sick,” says Lynn Downey, historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco. “(Levi’s dealers) are a bunch of idiots. I really hate them.”

Among the misconceptions floating around:

* A red line on the inside pants seam means the jeans were made before 1971 and are desirable.

“The red line means zip. Up until the early 1980s, the fabric (from which) Cone Mills cut our jeans was 29 inches wide and the selvage edge had this red thread in it. Then the mills went up to 60-inch wide looms and the red selvage disappeared. You could have a pair of Levi’s from 1927 that would have had the red selvage, but you can’t see it because back then pants were washed with really harsh soap and the line faded.”

* Look for the older indigo-dyed pieces because the blue jeans are no longer produced with indigo dye.

“They never used real indigo. There was a change in recipe in the ‘70s, but Cone Mills has been using synthetic, petroleum-based indigo from the beginning.”

* A real connoisseur wants jeans with punctured buttons. Before the ‘30s, the metal buttons had holes in them, resembling doughnuts.

“There was no consistency in the materials we used because, at that time, this was a small little Western overall company. There’s no consistency at all. I have this pair from 1890 that doesn’t have doughnut-hole buttons.”

* A double X (501 XX) on the label means the jeans are from the ‘50s.

XX designates extra-heavy fabric. “The two Xs have been used from the beginning up through the early ‘80s, when it was changed to three Xs because that was when Cone Mills started using the 60-inch wide fabric.”

* Levi’s also manufactured jeans under the JCPenney label.

“Our products were sold by JCPenney around the turn of the century, but we never made any products for anybody else.”