On the bottom of my deepest dresser drawer lies the very first pair of Levi’s blue jeans I ever owned. They were coveted “boy’s jeans,” purchased when I was 14 years old at an Army and Navy Store in suburban Pittsburgh. As I fondly look at these weathered-soft jeans 20 years later, I realize what they reveal to me about my adolescence and what their presence in my drawer reveals about me as an adult. I see my personal history, from the turned-up cuffs (de rigueur in 1978) to the faded nametag stitched inside, a remnant of the 1982 summer I worked at camp. I see glimpses of teenaged angst in the missing label, torn off to avoid revealing the size. Now, two decades (and a childbirth) later, I don’t harbor any delusions that I will ever wear these jeans again. So why then, do I find it so hard to part with them?
For me, owning Levi’s was an indoctrination into a kind of hip society. (I perceived them as cool, so when I donned them I became cool.) At the same time, in my adolescent mind, I wore them as a form of rebellion and a feminist statement. While my classmates were lurching uncomfortably around in skintight Sergio Valentes (girl pants), I was bopping in my red-label zip-front Levi’s (boy pants). They became a part of my identity; they became a part of who I wanted to be.
The Levi’s brand endures for two reasons. The product is synonymous with quality. Equally important, its marketing campaigns (most notably its television advertising) have successfully taken mass-produced jeans and imbued them with the same values I placed on my own pair: of originality, of individuality, and of nonconformity. As Steve Goldstein, VP-marketing and research for Levi’s said in a recent ad column in The New York Times: “Every rip has a story. That’s why the advertising has been much more about the wearer than the product.” The brand has endured because Levi’s always finds ways to package these values to appeal to a fresh generation of teenagers. This fall the Art Directors Club of New York awarded the company its Management Award for achievement in brand advertising and design communications and held a retrospective exhibit of the 150 year-old company that included television and print advertisements, testimonial letters written by customers (including one from a man claiming his Levi’s shirt saved his life) to the world’s oldest pair of Levi’s jeans (circa 1886-1902). Levi-Strauss was chosen for the award because its products, most notably the blue jeans, are so much a part of Americana, says ADC director Myrna Davis. “It’s a very satisfying product,” she remarks. “There is almost no other that is so pervasive and has such strong graphic imagery. It’s also very democratic--rich and poor people alike wear them.”
The Levi’s exhibit attracted a record 2,000 visitors in its two week run. The centerpiece was a long display case that showed Levi’s wares chronologically, from 1920s “waist overalls” to Jell-O colored jeans of the novelty-loving 1970s to a pair just purchased. Framed boxes on the wall provided a concurrent timeline of American history from the California Gold Rush to current events (the exhibit will soon be on permanent display at Levi’s headquarters in San Francisco). But the most captivating aspect was a darkened corner of monitors showing television advertising campaigns created over the past 30 years by Foote Cone & Belding in San Francisco, which, with one predecessor, has handled the account for 67 years.
Since 1984, Levi’s has created image-based campaigns that emphasize a brand of hip, street-smart, urbane sensibility; previous efforts focused more on specific product attributes and brand heritage. That year brought the celebrated “501 Blues” campaign, which featured grainy quick-cut urban vignettes set to spirit-soaring scores by blues singers, a capella quartets and the Boys Choir of Harlem. In 1988, witty, irreverent and frenetic Spike Lee spots appeared for the button-fly jeans featuring “real people” such as guys from Brooklyn who talk backwards for fun, and a talented young drummer who jams on plastic buckets on street corners. The theme: “Is your fly buttoned?”
In the 1990s, photographer and director Bruce Weber created style statements in a campaign for loose fitting jeans that captured godlike, stoic men poised against stark backgrounds in a photographic tableau, or in other spots, beautiful bodies leaping mid-air, celebrating the human form and the freedom offered by a loose fit. Humor returned in a 1996 campaign for wide leg pants in, for example, director Spike Jonz’s spot featuring an emergency room where the medical team breaks into the Soft Cell hit “Tainted Love” to the rhythm of an electronic heart monitor.
This year, Levi’s has further reinvented itself with its most elliptical and inscrutable (and therefore irresistible) campaign to date. A related series of ads themed “they go on” and shot by music video director Tarsem, they are a stream-of-consciousness serial of overlapping characters in disjointed and illogical sequences and relationships. Characters always seem to defy expectations, including a hip-hop DJ playing drum and bass music in cowboy country; a Grandma with spiked hair; a guy taking his Gremlin through a car wash with the windows down. There is no logical narrative, yet there are just enough connections, cameos (Lenny Kravitz, Quinten Crisp) and musical styles to make the concept compelling.
This campaign, which itself refuses to conform to viewer expectations of primetime television advertising, would seem to be the perfect approach to appeal to today’s youth, purported to be so jaded by traditional advertising that they are practically unreachable. The series appears to be a shoo-in for a Gold Pencil, but such a victory would be bitter-sweet indeed. In January, following an account review that shocked the ad community, Levi’s dropped FCB and awarded the estimated $90 million account to TBWA/Chiat/Day. Levi’s, whose declining sales recently caused the company to close plants and lay off workers, seemed to be following an industry pattern where long-term client/agency relationships are driven on the rocks by increased competition. Now that the creatively lauded new agency inherited the coveted account, it has also inherited the impassioned loyalty of generations of consumers, and the potential of a new market of youths. Any future campaigns will still need to tap into the brand’s authenticity and emotional pull. As the tagline says in a 1979 commercial, “fashions may change, but quality never goes out of style.” Or as in the current campaign, like my 20-year-old jeans attest, “they go on.”