世界最美牛仔裤（名家名译孙致礼）

It was the wrong kind of canvas for that purpose, but while talking with a miner down from the mother lode, he learned that pants—sturdy pants that would stand up to the rigors of the diggings-were almost impossible to find. Opportunity beckoned. On the spot, Strauss measured the man’s girth and inseam with a piece of string and, for six dollars in gold dust, had them tailored into a pair of stiff but rugged pants. The miner was delighted with the result, word got around about “those pants of Levi’s,” and Strauss was in business. The company has been in business ever since.

岂料这种帆布不适于做帐篷。不过，李维跟一个来自主矿脉的矿工交谈时了解到，人们简直买不到能经得起采矿磨损的结实耐穿的裤子。机会向他招手了。施特劳斯当场用一根带子量了那人的腰围和裤长，用帆布做成一条粗硬而耐磨的裤子，卖得了6美元的砂金。矿工感到很满意，于是有关“李维的那些裤子”的消息不胫而走，施特劳斯从此做起了生意。自那以后，他的公司一直在运作。

When Strauss ran out of canvas, he wrote his two brothers to send more. He received instead a tough, brown cotton cloth made in Nîmes, France—called serge de Nîmes and swiftly shortened to “denim” (the word “jeans” derives from Gênes , the French word for Genoa, where a similar cloth was produced). Almost from the first, Strauss had his cloth dyed the distinctive indigo that gave blue jeans their name, hut it was not until the 1870’s that he added the copper rivets which have long since become a company trademark. The rivets were the idea of a Virginia City, Nevada, tailor, Jacob W. Davis, who added them to pacify a mean-tempered miner called Alkali Ike. Alkali, the story goes, complained that the pockets of his jeans always tore when he stuffed them with ore samples and demanded that Davis do something about it. As a kind of joke, Davis took the pants to a blacksmith and had the pockets riveted; once again, the idea worked so well that word got around; in 1873 Strauss appropriated and patented the gimmick—and hired Davis as a regional manager.

施特劳斯用完了帆布，便写信叫哥哥再发一些过来，不想收到的却是法国尼姆产的一种坚韧的棕色棉布—称作“尼姆哗叽”（serge de Nimes），很快就简称为“劳动布”（英语词jeans（牛仔裤）源自于法语的Genes，即英语的Genoa（热那亚），此地生产一种类似的棉布）。几乎从一开始，施特劳斯就把他的布料染成别具一格的靛蓝色，因此便有了蓝色牛仔裤之称。不过，直至19世纪70年代，他才往裤子上加了铜铆钉；长期以来，这铜铆钉也就成了公司的标志。给裤子加上铆钉是内华达州弗吉尼亚市的裁缝雅各布·W·戴维斯想出的主意，他这样做是为了抚慰一个名叫阿尔卡利·艾克的脾气暴躁的矿工。据说此人抱怨他往口袋里装矿石标本时，口袋总是被撑破，要求戴维斯想想办法。戴维斯有点像开玩笑似的，把裤子拿到铁匠铺，给口袋打上了铆钉。这一招果然奏效，消息再一次不胫而走。1873年，施特劳斯采纳了这一小发明，出资为之申请了专利——并雇用戴维斯做地区经理。

By this time, Strauss had taken both his brothers and two brothers-in-law into the company and was ready for his third San Francisco store. Over the ensuing years the company prospered locally, and by the time of his death in 1902, Strauss had become a man of prominence in California. For three decades thereafter the business remained profitable though small, with sales largely confined to the working people of the West—cowboys, lumberjacks, railroad workers, and the like. Levi’s jeans were first introduced to the East, apparently, during the dude-ranch craze of the 1930’s, when vacationing Easterners returned and spread the word about the wonderful pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. From a company with fifteen salespeople, two plants, and almost no business east of the Mississippi in 1946, the organization grew in thirty years to include a sales force of more than twenty-two thousand, with fifty plants and offices in thirty-five countries. Each year, more than 250,000,000 items of Levi’s clothing are sold—including more than 83,000,000 pairs of riveted blue jeans. They have become, through marketing, word of mouth, and demonstrable reliability, the common pants of America. They can be purchased pre-washed, pre-faded, and pre-shrunk for the suitably proletarian look. They adapt themselves to any sort of idiosyncratic use; women slit them at the inseams and convert them into long skirts, men chop them off above the knees and turn them into something to be worn while challenging the surf. Decorations and ornamentations abound.

这时候，施特劳斯已把他的两个哥哥和两个姐夫招进了公司，并准备在旧金山开办他的第三个分店。此后的几十年间，公司在当地生意兴隆。1902年施特劳斯去世时，他已成为加利福尼亚的知名人士。在以后的30年中，生意虽然不大，但一直在盈利，主要的销售对象是西部的劳工阶层—诸如牛仔、伐木工、铁路工之类的人。李维的牛仔裤最初引进到东部，显然是在20世纪30年代的农场度假热潮中，西去度假的东部人回家后，便到处宣扬这种带铜铆钉的奇妙裤子。二次大战期间，蓝色牛仔裤又一次走俏，被宣布为紧要商品，只卖给从事防务工作的人。该公司在1946年时还只有15名销售员，两个加工厂，密西西比河以东几乎没有什么业务，而30年后则发展成拥有2万2千多人的销售队伍，并在35个国家设有50家加工厂和办事处。每年，李维服装的销售量超过2亿5千多万件—其中包括8千3百多万条钉有铜铆钉的蓝色牛仔裤。通过市场营销，口口相传，以及显而易见的可靠性，牛仔裤已成为美国的寻常裤装。人们还可以买到进行过水洗、褪色和缩水处理的牛仔裤，以符合无产者的形象。牛仔裤经过改造还可以供各种癖好的人使用。妇女们将裤管内缝拆开，把裤子改制成长裙；男人们将其从膝盖上方截下，变成冲浪时穿的短裤。人们还给牛仔裤缀上各式各样的装饰物。

The pants have become a tradition, and along the way have acquired a history of their own—so much so that the company has opened a museum in San Francisco. There was, for example, the turn-of-the-century trainman who replaced a faulty coupling with a pair of jeans; the Wyoming man who used his jeans as a towrope to haul his car out of a ditch; the Californian who found several pairs in an abandoned mine, wore them, then discovered they were sixty-three years old and still as good as new and turned them over to the Smithsonian as a tribute to their toughness. And then there is the particularly terrifying story of the careless construction worker who dangled fifty-two stories above the street until rescued, his sole support the Levi’s belt loop through which his rope was hooked.

牛仔裤已成为一种传统，在其发展过程中谱写了自己的历史——这历史如此丰富多彩，公司在旧金山建立了一座博物馆。馆中的展品例如：19世纪、20世纪之交的时候，一位列车员用一条牛仔裤代替失灵的列车挂钩；怀俄明州的一个男子用牛仔裤把汽车从沟里拖出来；一个加利福尼亚人在一个废弃的矿井里捡到几条牛仔裤，穿上后发现这些裤子已有63年的历史，还依然像新的一样，便将其捐给史密斯学会，以表彰它的结实耐用。还有一个特别惊心动魄的故事：一个粗心的建筑工人悬挂在52层楼上，直至获救，他的唯一支撑点就是李维牛仔裤的裤带扣，他的安全绳就扣着这裤带扣。