Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal its passage.
In my last post, I discussed the process of buying school supplies in preparation of going back to school. In this post, we take a look at another kind of purchase: jeans. September is jean-selling season. Retailers gear up for the hordes of teenagers (and their parents) doing back-to-school shopping. I look at two retailers, one that uses ritual and one that does not.
The Gap: No Ritual
The Gap has traditionally been a jeans-driven brand, re-inventing “business casual” in the ‘90s. Their take on the jean, this season, is a curious position:
I took this photo through the window of Toronto’s flag-ship store on the tony Bloor Street West (the same street that will be thronged with Chanel-hunting Hollywood starlets during the Toronto International Film Festival).
Notice a few things about this woman:
1. She’s blonde
2. She has impossibly long legs
3. She is wearing 2.5-inch heels with a pair of “casual” pants
4. She is parting her mouth sexily
The caption, which you can’t quite read is “Putting the it in fit.” The copy is telling us that Gap jeans will fit. The picture is telling us that women are supposed to look like tall, blonde, sexy models who wear high heels with casual jeans. I find it hard to believe that jeans that fit her will actually fit me.
How might this positioning relate to autumn rituals? If you’re having difficulty explaining that, it’s because it doesn’t. This campaign is the tired, uninspired advertising laziness. Creative ad workers likely relied on the notion of the “aspirational” product. People will buy this product because they want to look like that model, this logic goes.
It’s the same logic that continues to market household cleaners only to women (even though men are doing more housework). This is what we “should” aspire to as women: being tall, skinny and blonde, and having a clean house.
Children going back to school, and their parents who bring along their wallets, are in back-to-school mode. This campaign says nothing about this ritual of rejuevenation, re-invention, “buckling down,” and getting “back to work.” The end of summer is irrelevant to this campaign.
Levi’s: On-Ritual
Contrast this with the Levi’s fall campaign. Levi’s has had its share of downs in the last few decades. Its simple, Coca-cola, American-as-Apple-Pie brand image worked during the big-hair ‘80s, but their relative underinvestment in either design on brand dragged down their sales throughout the ‘90s and the ‘00s.
But take a look at their most recent jeans campaign:
I took this in the subway in Toronto that is connected to the city’s mid-market shopping Mecca: Eaton Centre.
Other images of this subway campaign portray the jeans as “worker” jeans. Average-looking beautiful people (instead of beautiful, beautiful people) are featured in sepia-toned, 1930s-inspired photographs. The images evoke the waning sun of summer and the “back to work” spirit of “back to school.”
What’s strikingly different from the Gap campaign is the focus on “work.” “We are all workers” is an interesting take on this back-to-school time. The ritual of beginning a job often involves getting equipment or tools. The jeans are not positioned as “aspirational,” or something that will make you look beautiful. Instead, they’re positioned as necessary to “get the job done.”
The images are evocative of the iconic Depression-era photos of “Okies” working in California:
The brand has even played up the “workers” aspect on its Web site: http://explore.levi.com/news/we-are-all-workers/ with YouTube interviews with “workers” of the depressed town Braddock, PA.
What is the message of this campaign:
1. People are hurting economically
2. Jeans are for working in
3. There is redemption hidden inside the lessons of hard economic times
Analysis: Ritual Still Needs Substance
These contrasts are stark. The Gap chose to rely on “features” (i.e., fit) and “aspirational” imagery. But Levi’s focused on the timing on the campaign, making it far more interesting and nuanced.
I personally am very intrigued by Levi’s campaign. The interviews in the videos are earnest, without guile and a little sad. But I find that more comforting than the pleasant fiction of the Gap campaign. In fact, I find the image of yet another 6’ blonde in a pair of jeans a little enraging.
If brands were to be honest, they would acknowledge these hard economic times. Notably, however, Levi’s stops short of acknowledging where its jeans are made. As a company, they must bear some responsibility for the end of work in the US: their jeans are made in China and Mexico. These jeans are not made by American workers, even those in Braddock, PA. And clearly that town could use a few jobs.
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