Mustang

Mustang's history starts in 1932 in Künzelsau, in what is now Baden-Württemberg, where Luise Hermann founded a small clothing factory with six seamstresses producing workwear. The jump into denim came in 1948: Albert Sefranek, who had married into the Hermann family, traded six bottles of local schnapps for six pairs of original American jeans, then took the seams apart to use as pattern templates for the factory's own production — a workaround for building denim expertise in postwar Germany without direct access to American manufacturing know-how. That improvised reverse-engineering made the company one of the first denim producers in Europe. Mustang also developed what it describes as the first jeans made for women in Europe, marketed at the time as 'girls camping pants,' a notable move given how far outside conventional women's fashion denim then sat. The Mustang brand name itself, evoking American car and cowboy imagery, was adopted in 1958, a decade after the company's first jeans left the Künzelsau factory.