This is why you have those tiny metal buttons on your jeans

It’s a part of your pants that’s often forgotten – those small metal circles on the pockets. But they actually serve a pretty important purpose.

Called rivets, they’re placed on the parts of your jeans that are most likely to be ripped by everyday movement and wear. Basically, they help hold the fabric together so your favourite pair of skinny jeans don’t fall apart after one wear.

And the impact of these rivets actually goes beyond that – they’re the reason you have jeans as we know them now.

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According to The Independent, in the 1870s, labourers wore denim trousers – but they disintegrated quickly, so a labourer’s wife asked a tailor if there was something that could be done to make them not fall apart so quickly.

The tailor, Jacob Davis, came up with the idea of adding rivets to the pressure points where jeans showed the most signs of wear – the pockets and base of the fly. His pants ended up being a hit with labourers.

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According to The Independent, he then “contacted a certain Levi Strauss, who was a dry goods merchant at the time and had sold Mr Davis the fabric to make his trousers. The two men received a patent on the design in 1873, and the riveted trousers became a huge success – though they only took the name ‘jeans’ during the 1960s.”

Check out the video above for more uses for your jeans you probably didn’t know about. Let us know what you think by tweeting @YahooStyleCA.