How do you pluralize Levi's?

Question

Okay, so jeans and pants are referred to as plural. When we refer to a brand of jeans, we pluralize the brand by saying and writing things like:

"I got Girbauds for my birthday." (a pair of Girbaud jeans)

"She's going to wear my Lees tonight." (a pair of Lee jeans)

"I'll wear Armani Exchanges." (a pair of Armani Exchange jeans)

However, when it comes to Levi's jeans, the name is possessive. In my head, it seems like we should say:

"John's wearing Levi'ses." (a pair of Levi's jeans)

That's not what we say, tough. We say it with a single S. But how do we write it so that it conforms to the rule of pluralizing?

One thought I had was "Levis'," but that's not the name. The name contains an apostrophe and that apostrophe goes before the S (i.e., Levi's jeans).

Anyway, I'm writing something and I really need to figure out how to write "Levi's" in a context like shown in the three examples above. I don't want to stilt the language by rewording it. I want what I write to reflect what was actually said.

Any help you might give would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, this is different than a question I saw on here about McDonald's because when we pluralize McDonald's, we actually say the second S (i.e., McDonald'ses).

Answer 1

The term Levi’s on its own admits no inflections. You cannot make it singular, and it’s already plural. You also cannot make it (more) possessive. This is simply how it works.

There are several reasons for this. Brand names like Macdonald’s are fundamentally apocopations for longer terms like MacDonald’s^® restaurants or Levi’s^® brand jeans from which we’ve retained only the first element in the noun phrase. This can lead to odd situations.

In the first case the same word admits both singular and plural uses: people commonly say this McDonald’s for the singular side-by-side with these McDonald’s for the plural. If you add back the missing restaurant or restaurants respectively, you can see why this makes sense.

But in the second case it’s already a plurale tantum perhaps because jeans itself already is, and so requires periphrasis to represent a single item: this pair of Levi’s is talking about just one garment.

That’s because being a plurale tantum already, saying these Levi’s equally represents both this pair of them and many. It is impossible to say of a free-standing phrase without external context or further qualification just how many garments are meant by saying these Levi’s. It already means both possibilities, so more must be added by periphrasis or context, not by inflection, to specify what was meant.