The images are familiar: four hip young things
cruise down a post-industrial highway, the throb of their stereo syncing
with the lines on the pavement and the chrome streetlamps overhead.
Heartbeat fast, our heroes speed past a female version of the next
generation Terminator from Terminator 2. She’s able to shape-shift, but just
stands there as if she’s been fed lithium. The car stops; the hip young
things in their twisted-seam jeans climb out and twist each other’s limbs,
gleefully exchanging body parts like Mr. Potato Head dolls. Men and women
swap heads, confounding the logos on the restroom doors. Because these jeans
are unisex, they obscure sexual characteristics and stereotypes. They’re
club-kid baggy; as long as you’re young and beautiful, you too can
shape-shift. Little old ladies look on, mouths agape, as wannabe kids in the
parking lot walk past with their heads twisted backwards, like Linda Blair’s
Regan in The Exorcist. As the car speeds off, a hand is left on the
pavement. A small terrier trots behind with this oversight lodged in its
mouth, begging the car to come back and let him in.
You’ve seen this advert, or a truncated version of it, if you’ve been to the
cinema or watched TV in the last two years. Twist, directed by Frank Budgen,
is the first in a hugely successful series of ads for Levi’s engineered
jeans, conceived by the Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) agency. Twist and its
sequels are part rock video, part science fiction.
Throughout most of the nineties, jeans were everywhere, thanks to dress-down Fridays and slacker cool: dressing up was trying too hard, whether you were a student or a bank clerk. In the eighties, Levi’s 501s were probably the best jeans around, with cult advertising that propelled Lynyrd Skynyrd and Marvin Gaye tracks back into the UK charts. Levi’s, with their rockola history, were classics, and ubiquitous. But ubiquity became saturation in the nineties, and in a world where jeans were the uniform of what critic Thomas Frank calls ‘the rebel consumer’ subtle differences meant everything. Turn-ups, limited editions, vintage washes, cult brands like Wrangler, Lois, Evisu and Earl: these were fetishised. In this climate, basic Levi’s 501s were dad jeans, something that Tony Blair might wear with his Paul Smith shirt as proof he was still down with the kids.
A mid-nineties Levi’s campaign by Chiat Day sought to revive Levi’s image, and its fortunes, by presenting skinny waifs next to fifties icons like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe with the tagline: ‘Our models can beat up their models.’ Needless to say, it bombed. BBH was called in to try a different tack, as Levi’s created some limited editions and reissued some of its rarest designs under the boutique Red Label and Sta-Prest offshoots. BBH’s late-nineties Flat Eric campaign for Sta-Prest denim sent a charismatic felt puppet and his slacker human sidekick road-tripping for kicks. The boutique jeans were a success, the ad’s theme music charted in several countries, and Flat Eric puppets found homes perching on countless student stereo systems.
Here was the breakthrough. Forget fifties Americana. Forget the Wild West. Forget well-scrubbed young men and women who look like 90210 cast members getting it on in laundromats to classic rock. That kind of rebellion was too institutionalised, too last century. Besides, by now it was Gap’s territory.
In Odyssey, the follow-up to Twist, a young man sprints through the walls of room after room, leaving clouds of concrete dust in his wake. A young woman is running in parallel. In the last room they pause for breath, exchange knowing looks, then race out of the building, up trees, and into outer space: all to the accompaniment of some portentous-sounding Handel. The tagline is ‘Freedom to move’, but like Twist, Odyssey is really about freedom from history, freedom from the body’s earthbound demands. As the male and female leads give each other the eye before racing into space, sex is implied as a reward only available to those who can evolve beyond the need for it. The ad’s title is deliberately redolent of Kubrick’s 2001, and there’s the similar choice of music to consider; the similar path from hominids confronted with the obelisk in the savannah to modern man’s quest for the stars. It’s hard to fuck in zero gravity, but those baggy crazily seamed jeans sure look cool as they billow into the void.
Both Twist and Odyssey have won numerous industry awards; both have won British Television and D&AD gold awards. Odyssey picked up a gold in Cannes; Twist, two silver Clios. But perhaps the best tribute is being spoofed in other ads. BBH cannily allowed the Mother agency permission to base an ad for Lilt soda on Odyssey. Two heavy-set Jamaican women slam through concrete until they reach a bench flanked by palm trees, where, giggling, they crack open cans of the eponymous fizzy drink. The hiss of the cans opening is as post-coital as Odyssey’s show of legs bicycling into space.
Rub Yourself, the latest Levi’s campaign
for worn denim, amps up the sex. One of the 30-second spots opens with a
model face down in a puddle of drool. Models convulse on beds, lick glass
vitrines, or stare into the camera through black-ringed eyes, legs
twitching. One humps a bowling alley; another seems to be masturbating
against the side of a car, eyes closed in ecstasy. One man dips his head in
and out of a PVC-foam wall as if he’s going down on it. Pole’s soundtrack
skitters like a bug zapper, and most of these models look like nothing more
than human cockroaches trying to shed their skins. They live in gritty urban
environments that they want to become part of, in the most literal way
possible: remember Cronenberg’s Crash? So these models hump away at the
concrete like addicts gone cold turkey, with only their frayed and holey
jeans as protection. A condom with a hole in it isn’t one I’d trust, and
this sequence of ads seems to flirt uncomfortably with a post-AIDS sense of
what is risky, what is rebellious.
BBH’s Mel Exon assures me that these models were carefully selected to look
healthy, rather than sickly or emaciated, and that the Rub Yourself ads have
been well received by focus groups, who found these images edgy and
challenging. Maybe so; they’re certainly hard to ignore. At any rate, a new
campaign is in the works, set to launch next spring. Whatever it is, it’s
sure to make us pay attention.
Emily Bick is the Fashion Editor for contemporary and is working on a PhD on the fan culture of science fiction Levi’s ad campaigns.