Levi strauss biography wikipedia

Levi Strauss (February 26, – September 26, ) was a German-born American maker of clothing.

Born as Löb Strauss into a Jewish family in Buttenheim in Franconia, Bavaria, now a part of Germany. In , Strauss, his mother and two sisters moved to New York City to join his brothers Jonas and Louis Löb in their dry goods business. By , he had adopted the name "Levi Strauss".

In , Strauss moved to bustling San Francisco, California, where the California Gold Rush was still in high gear. He expected that the mining camps would welcome his buttons, scissors, thread and bolts of fabric; additionally, he had yards of canvassailcloth intended for tent-making and as covers for the Conestoga wagons that dotted the landscape next to every stream and river in the area.

It was on California Street that Strauss and his brother-in-law David Stern opened a dry goods wholesale business called Levi Strauss & Co. Strauss was often found leading a pack-horse, heavily laden with merchandise, directly into the mining camps found throughout the region. The story goes that both prospectors and miners, often complaining about the easily torn cotton "britches" and pockets that "split right out" gave Strauss the idea to make a rugged overall trouser for the miners to wear. These were fashioned from bolts of brown canvas sailcloth, with gold ore storage pockets that were nearly impossible to split. Strauss exhausted his original supply of canvas as the demand grew for his hard-wearing overalls, and so he switched to a sturdy fabric called serge, made in Nimes, France. Originally called serge de Nimes, the name was soon shortened to denim.

In , Strauss received a letter from Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor. Davis was one of Strauss's regular customers, who purchased bolts of cloth from the company to use for his own business. In this letter, Davis told Strauss about the interesting way in which he made pants for his customers: he placed metal rivets at the poi

This article is about the anthropologist. For the maker of clothes, see Levi Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (pronounced [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November – 30 October ) was a Frenchanthropologist. He was born to French Jewish parents in Brussels. He grew up in Paris. He came up with structural anthropology, which is the idea that people think about the world in terms of opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites. "From the very start," he wrote, "the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions." [Structuralism and Ecology, ]

Important works

• Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. *Rodney Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, )
• Race et histoire (, UNESCO; ExtractArchived at the Wayback Machine from "Race and History" – in English; see also The Race Question, UNESCO, )
• Tristes tropiques (, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, ) – also translated as A World on the Wane
• Anthropologie structurale (, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, )
• Le Totemisme aujourdhui (, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, )
• La Pensée sauvage (, The Savage Mind, )
• Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
  • Le Cru et le cuit (, The Raw and the Cooked, )
  • Du miel aux cendres (, From Honey to Ashes, )
  • L'Origine des manières de table, , The Origin of Table Manners,
  • L'Homme nu (, The Naked Man, )
• Anthropologie structurale deux (, Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, trans. M. Layton, )
• La Voie des masques (, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, )
• Paroles donnés (, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, –, trans. Roy Willis, )
• Le Regard éloigne (, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, )
• La Potiè