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WEKU
WEKU
Business
Jessica Green

Durable and enduring, blue jeans turn 150 this week

Levi Strauss Jacob Davis Emma McClendon NPR
Pedestrians pass the Levi's store in in New York's Times Square. An immigrant and tailor named Jacob Davis teamed up with dry goods merchant Levi Strauss to patent the first riveted blue jeans in 1873. (Richard Drew/AP)

There's bootcut, skinny, flare, ripped, low-rise, high-rise — even blue jean look-alikes called jeggings impersonating the classic denim piece.

They all lead back a century and a half ago, to a Latvian-Jewish immigrant working as a tailor in Reno, Nev., named Jacob Davis. He had a customer whose work pants kept tearing.

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