Selling Nostalgia Quest For Authenticity Opens Door For Levi Strauss To Market ‘Vintage’ Jeans Costing $225 A Pair

Down on West Broadway and Grand Street, two well-coiffed guys pass at the corner. One of them gazes back at the other’s jeans, especially at the cuffs, which are rolled up a few inches, just like his own. He squints, as if trying to read the smallest row of letters on an eye-doctor’s chart. Then he smiles, knowingly, and walks on.

This being SoHo, it’s hard to say what transpired, but it’s a fair bet that it was the sidewalk ritual of denim connoisseurs - a small but growing subculture that collects rare, old Levi’s bluejeans with the same zeal that other subcultures devote to rare books, stamps, or record albums.

The rolled-up cuff is the cognoscente’s membership card. It flashes the red selvage - the thin red stitch sewn along the sideseam on every pair of Levi’s made before 1971 - as a sign to like-minded passersby that the wearer, too, is in the know.

Collectors pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars for pre-1970s Levi’s 501 and 201 jeans. Inspired by this underground market, Levi Strauss & Co. is manufacturing its own official “vintage line” of denim wear - exact replicas of the original designs going back to the turn of the century - and selling them in a few exclusive stores. It’s part of the company’s struggle to preserve its franchise, and market share, against burgeoning boutique competition. It is also a bid to add the trendy marketing cache of affected “authenticity” to a product that should need no such introduction.

The price: $225 a pair.

The boutiques that carry these jeans - fewer than 20 nationwide - are selling them as fast as the Levi’s looms can spin the fabric. Which isn’t so fast, given that they are the original, 28-inch-wide looms dating from the 1920s.

The fabric, ringspun denim, is rougher and heavier than that in today’s garden-variety jeans (14 ounces per yard, compared with 12). Also revived: the natural indigo dye, zinc buttons, hidden copper rivets, and - another bit to make cognoscente swoon - the red trademark tab with “Levi’s” in capital letters (in 1971, the company changed the E to lower-case).

Levi Strauss even hired a historian to rifle through the company archives and make sure all these details are true to the original. Lynn Downey, who holds the job, notes that the original 501s were worn by miners and cowboys. The 201s, from the 1930s, “were what the guys wore when they worked in the WPA or built the Golden Gate Bridge …”

“It’s a piece of Americana,” Downey continues, “that might become part of you when you put on this clothing.”

Believe that and they’ve got a pair of jeans you can buy.

Fastidiousness of detail is the key here, the magic ingredient that freshens up an old-hat commodity in a jaded culture - the allure of the authentic.

“You see this quest for authenticity everywhere,” says Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, a journal of cultural criticism. “From microbrews to Red Kamel cigarettes to all the different kinds of wholesome breads to the rise of sports-utility cars - all of which are billed as ways of getting away from our over-civilized, consumerist selves.”

Ads for these products are designed to seem like anti-ads - appeals to individualism and to customers who fancy themselves resistant to the manipulations of marketers.

In his new book, “The Conquest of Cool,” Frank calls this sort of advertising “hip consumerism … a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age, despairs of the whole notion of manufactured authenticity.

“I assure you,” he says, “if the cowboys and miners who wore those old jeans were alive today, they would be wearing new and more comfortable jeans. There’s this presumption that retro quality means better quality, but who says?”

Frank sees the phenomenon of $225 bluejeans as a logical extension of the authenticity quest. “That’s what jeans were originally promising to do in the ‘50s,” he says. “They were going to put us in touch with some working-class past that got lost in the suburbs. But jeans don’t do that anymore. There are so many brands and these awful designer jeans. So, they have to come up with something that’s … over-the-top authentic.”

The logic certainly fits Levi Strauss & Co.’s current corporate strategy. Alice Cuneo, a reporter for Advertising Age, notes that Levi’s sales were down last year, so much so that the executives of the world’s largest apparel company ordered a massive overhaul.

The company is being squeezed from both ends of the marketplace. At one extreme are the designer jeans by Calvin Klein and Donna Karan; on the other side, stores like J.C. Penney and Sears have their own denim lines.

It is a wrenching trend for Levi Strauss which, after all, invented bluejeans.