It’s hard to remember sometimes that Levi’s started out as work trousers and that’s certainly not how they’re sold in China which, as far as Western companies are concerned anyway, is the rightful destination for all things luxury. Tough if you’re a peasant working on the land (where you could probably do with a pair of jeans) but there you go.
Anyway Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai has produced this lively campaign for Levi’s new Revel jeans for women. And these are no ordinary troos but ‘demi curve skinny jeans’ created by ‘liquid shaping technology.’ At $98 a pair – but if they were $50 nobody in the market for fashion jeans would touch them with a bargepole.
And here are some more Chinese beauties (they seem to have a lot of them but, then, they have a lot of everything) enjoying themselves in a W+K installation created from iPads.
Levi’s has changed tack quite a lot over the past two decade; fair enough for different markets but it might find things a bit easier if it decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it. Middle-aged executives who buy them to try to look cool will stick with the brand anyway – there’s too much learning required for them to enter the fashion jungle.
Maybe rather more Revel-style marketing would be good for the company’s other lines. Looking mean and moody, the norm in jeans marketing everywhere, has become just wallpaper.
