Levi's

After nearly 100 years of steady, though unremarkable, sales—almost entirely wholesale, to cowboys and agricultural workers in the West—the popularity of Levi's flourished after World War II when they became the fashionable attire of middle-class teenagers, spurred by a new marketing thrust in which the company abandoned wholesaling in favor of manufacturing garments under its own name.

The unchallenged supremacy of Levi's—in which the brand name has become virtually the generic name for the product—also reflects the penchant of bourgeois youth to adopt the attire and the mannerisms of lower social classes.