Through the cooperation of the Vila Marija Home for Adults and with the co-financing of the city of Pula, the Merlin Association enriches the activities offered in the Susret Adult Daycare Center for People with Mental Disabilities Meeting in Pula through creative workshops in jeans re-design. In these workshops, people attending the Adult Daycare Center are primarily having fun and spending time with the others working on their socialization, but by participating in activities other than socialization they also work to preserve and develop their sensory and motor skills, concentration, creativity, self-expression and self-confidence, which all in turn contributes to a significant increase in the quality of life of these beneficiaries.
Jeans will never go out of fashion, and jeans are designed to be durable and indestructible under any conditions. The first jeans pants were made in Genoa when this city was an independent republic and a naval force. They were designed for navy members, which required suits for all weather conditions. The root of the English word jeans or blue jeans lies in the French expression used at the time: blue de Genes. Levi Strauss, a Bavarian retailer from San Francisco, sold these durable pants to miners in California in the 1850s. Jacob Davis was a tailor who, together with Strauss, patented the jeans pants with copper buttons as an enhancement to make these pants more durable and tearproof, and he found the customers among the workers, farmers and trappers - that is the origin of Croatian name for these pants - "traperice". Levi's brand is still a synonym for jeans. They were embraced by the generation of rebellious youth of the fifties of the last century, and they have since then become a part of our everyday life but also of fashionable runways.
We believe that each of us has at least one piece of clothing made of jeans in our wardrobe that we do not wear but love so much. In our workshop we offer the alternative to throwing that garment into trash - to re-design that jeans garment and create new, permanent and indestructible creations. With little imagination and skill we transform them into unique purses, bags, backpacks, water bottle cases, shoes ...
