Books in Brief: Levi’s

Levi’s: The “Shrink-to-Fit” Business That Stretched to Cover the World, by Ed Cray (Houghton Mifflin, 286 pp., $9.95).

The hills, valleys, and, eventually, mountains on the corporate chart of Levi Strauss & Co. are outlined with relish by a guy who appears in his weaker moments to be working out an homage to his jeans. “I am one of [Levi Strauss’s] best customers; I just don’t have time to wear out my blue jeans as much as I used to,” said the first citizen of Plains, Georgia, from the vantage point of his big white house in Washington a year ago, thus demonstrating his participation in the national cult of denim. Mr. Cray carries his story from the immigrant peddler’s modest beginnings in San Francisco through an almost Mellonesque cataloguing of siblings, collateral descendants, and in-laws, the current generation having carried the house that overalls built to a $1.56-billion annual sales figure in 1977. A Reno, Nevada tailor actually invented the riveted pants we all know, but he asked Levi Strauss to take out the patent. Thereafter, the tailor became Strauss’s supervisor, and with few exceptions each year brought increasing profits to the company. You can still make a bundle (and run the risk of arrest) by scalping Levi’s behind the Iron Curtain, and the French-chic versions of Levi Strauss’s virtually indestructible pantaloons (as he liked to call them) sell for nearly $100 and are de rigueur in the posh spots of the civilized world. Bits of all of this, and interviews with, seemingly, every living descendant and significant executive of the company, flesh out Cray’s straightforward story of this company that actually cares, and has evidently always cared, about its employees’ feelings and families. A rare business, Levi Strauss’s, run by a family devoted to humanitarian causes and to the never-ending search for the perfect pair of casual pants. And the book is well written, give or take clichés like the reference to someone’s “many-splendored home in the city”; phrases like “speculators abounded; bounders speculated”; and perhaps just a shade too much reverence for the party line of the Strauss executives.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Levi’s: The “Shrink-to-Fit” Business That Stretched to Cover the World, by Ed Cray (Houghton Mifflin, 286 pp., $9.95).

The hills, valleys, and, eventually, mountains on the corporate chart of Levi Strauss & Co. are outlined with relish by a guy who appears in his weaker moments to be working out an homage to his jeans. “I am one of [Levi Strauss’s] best customers; I just don’t have time to wear out my blue jeans as much as I used to,” said the first citizen of Plains, Georgia, from the vantage point of his big white house in Washington a year ago, thus demonstrating his participation in the national cult of denim. Mr. Cray carries his story from the immigrant peddler’s modest beginnings in San Francisco through an almost Mellonesque cataloguing of siblings, collateral descendants, and in-laws, the current generation having carried the house that overalls built to a $1.56-billion annual sales figure in 1977. A Reno, Nevada tailor actually invented the riveted pants we all know, but he asked Levi Strauss to take out the patent. Thereafter, the tailor became Strauss’s supervisor, and with few exceptions each year brought increasing profits to the company. You can still make a bundle (and run the risk of arrest) by scalping Levi’s behind the Iron Curtain, and the French-chic versions of Levi Strauss’s virtually indestructible pantaloons (as he liked to call them) sell for nearly $100 and are de rigueur in the posh spots of the civilized world. Bits of all of this, and interviews with, seemingly, every living descendant and significant executive of the company, flesh out Cray’s straightforward story of this company that actually cares, and has evidently always cared, about its employees’ feelings and families. A rare business, Levi Strauss’s, run by a family devoted to humanitarian causes and to the never-ending search for the perfect pair of casual pants. And the book is well written, give or take clichés like the reference to someone’s “many-splendored home in the city”; phrases like “speculators abounded; bounders speculated”; and perhaps just a shade too much reverence for the party line of the Strauss executives.