Oscar levi strauss biography
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The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss – to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.
Lévi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world.
Strauss believed that there would be a great demand for these "waist overalls" as he called them, but they are best known today as blue jeans. Brothers Jonas and Louis had already started a wholesale dry goods business where the younger Strauss began to learn the trade.
When news of the California Gold Rush hit, Strauss decided that was the place for him to branch out and make his fortune.
His other business pursuits were charter member and treasurer of the San Francisco Board of Trade, director of the Nevada Bank, the Liverpool, London and Globe Insurance Company and the San Francisco Gas and Electric Company. After that, in 1880s Levi Strauss leased space for his own factory south of Market Street and production moves there.
There were restrictions on where they could live and special taxes placed on them because of their faith.
When he was around the age of sixteen, Strauss lost his father to tuberculosis. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.
Levi Strauss
Blue jeans are perhaps the quintessential American item of clothing, and they were invented by two immigrants: Jacob Davis of Latvia and the man whose name the jeans bear, Levi Strauss of Germany.
Strauss, his mother and two of his sisters joined his older brothers in New York in 1847 after his father died.
Davis, a tailor in Nevada, had bought cloth from Strauss for his own business and developed a special way to make more durable pants.
He died on September 26, 1902 in San Francisco at the age of 73 and left. He helped establish the first synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, in the city. Living in Bavaria, the Strausses experienced religious discrimination because they were Jewish.
In that letter Davis told him about the new way he was making pants from duck and denim.
Using a series of different locations in the city over the years, he sold clothing, fabric, and other items to small shops in the region.
As his business thrived, Strauss supported numerous religious and social causes. He became a well-known figure in the city being active in the business and cultural life of San Francisco and supporting the Jewish community, he himself being of German Jewish descent.
Strauss also gave money to several charities, including special funds for orphans.
Birth of Blue Jeans
A customer, Jacob Davis, wrote to Strauss in 1872, asking for his help. 1847 he went to New York with his two sisters and mother to join his brothers on dry goods wholesale business. He opened his dry goods wholesale business as Levi Strauss & Co.
and sold clothing, bedding, combs, purses, handkerchiefs and bolts of fabric delivered from his brothers in New York. He, his mother, and two sisters made their way to the United States two years later. Unable to cover the cost himself, Davis asked Strauss to pay the fee so that he could secure a patent for his unique design.
The following year, the patent was granted to Strauss and Davis.
As a young professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo to teach sociology. In 1850 he changed his name to Levi and in 1853 he became an American citizen. So in 1853, the year he became a U.S. citizen, Strauss traveled to San Francisco.
First called simply Levi Strauss, his wholesale business imported dry goods like clothes, fabric and umbrellas and sold them to stores.
Strauss loved the idea and began making riveted “waist overalls.” The famous 501 jeans, then known as “XX,” were born.
Strauss became famous and rich.