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For The Love of Levi's
Jeans' global popularity is apparent in crowds at Levi Strauss' birthplace.
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RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
T
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INTO
Buttenheim, Germany
his year marks a century
and a half since a young
German Jewish immigrant
named Levi Strauss settled
in San Francisco, became an
American citizen and opened a dry
goods store.
It also marks 130 years since Strauss
and an associate, Jacob Davis, took
out a joint patent for "riveted waist-
overalls" — heavy-duty work pants
reinforced with metal rivets at the cor-
ners of pockets, the base of the fly
and other stress points.
Today, we call their invention
c,•
jeans.
A century after his death, Levi
Strauss is a household name around
the world. His invention has evolved
from work trousers to fashion icon,
becoming a symbol of freedom,
youth, independence, pioneering spir-
it
and sometimes more than that.
It all started in Buttenheim,
Germany, a sleepy market town in
northern Bavaria near Bamberg,
where Levi Strauss was born on Feb.
26, 1829.
Today, in the blue-trimmed, half-
timbered house where he was born
and raised, a museum honors Levi
and what the museum calls "the most
famous pair of trousers in the history
of mankind."
Opened in 2000, the Levi Strauss
Museum, which has won several
awards, is subtitled "Jeans and Cult."
In less than three years it has
attracted some 30,000 visitors from as
far away as China to an out-of-the-
way village of just 3,000. The only
other attractions here are a pair of
breweries, a baroque church and a
rundown manor house.
"We are very surprised at the num-
ber of foreign visitors we get," said
the museum's director, Tanja
Roppelt. "Two days after we opened,
we already had visitors from Japan.
There is nothing else in Buttenheim,
so if people come here they are com-
ing for this museum."
The popularity of the museum bears
vivid witness to the way jeans have
conquered the world, Roppelt said.
GEAR
10/ 3
2003
call us to advertise
78
248.354.6060
"I would say that 95 percent of our
visitors are wearing jeans," she said.
"Most of them come because they
have worn jeans all their lives and
want to see how they came into exis-
tence, how it all began."
Pretty much no one in Buttenheim
had any inkling that Strauss had
been born here until 20 years ago,
when a woman in Milwaukee organ-
izing a festival about German immi-
grants wrote to the former mayor
asking for information.
Local officials searching through
Jewish birth and death records and
emigration documents discovered that
looms out of an alleyway to mark the
entrance, and a big Levi's shop stands
a few yards down the street.
The museum uses audio-guide
headsets, videos and wall panel dis-
plays to recount the history of jeans
and how they are made and marketed.
It also includes a room full of glass
cases exhibiting vintage Levi's dating
back decades.
Just as importantly, however, the
museum traces the personal story of Levi
Strauss himself, using an audio narration
that presents much of the story as if seen
through Strauss' own eyes.
It tells the fascinating and little-
—
Portrait of Levi Strauss at the entrance to the Levi Strauss Museum in
Buttenheim, Germany
Strauss indeed had been born and
lived his childhood in one of the old-
est houses still standing in the village.
Town authorities purchased the
dilapidated building, which dates
from 1687, and eventually restored it
as close to its original form as possi-
ble. A huge portrait of Strauss now
known tale of 19th-century rural
Jewish life in Bavaria as well as the
epic saga of immigration to the
United States.
Jews settled in Buttenheim in the
17th century. A synagogue was built
there around 1740, and by 1810 Jews
made up one-fifth of Buttenheim's