How Levi's reclaimed the youth
The history of Levi's Engineered Jeans and how they became a denim cult classic
By the end of the 90s, the Levi’s 501 was the denim to rule all denim. While the style was worn by almost everyone, the issue Levi’s was facing was capturing the attention of the youth. Young people were just not interested in wearing the 501s because of the adoption of the style by the older generation—a tale as old as time.
At the start of the 2000s, brands like Gap, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein captured the youth with trendy product styles and marketing, something that Levi’s wasn’t putting a lot of focus in at the time.
Levi’s noticed this shift: the generation that grew up with Levi’s had started becoming older, and that had an apparent effect on how the youth looked at the brand. So Levi’s set out to figure out how to recapture the attention of the youth and hopefully turn them into lifelong customers of the brand.
Levi’s designers were tasked with brainstorming new ideas to bring to the table. The goal was to create jeans that would appeal to the youth. A turning point came to them when they thought of deconstructing existing 501s and reassembling them in unique ways to create a relaxed fit that was built for movement.
This was the beginning of Levi’s Engineered Jeans.
Features like larger pockets that were slightly slanted and placed lower on the back of the jeans, extended back yoke for additional comfort and ergonomically shaped cuffs were some of the characteristics that defined the Engineered Jeans. But the one key feature that made these jeans special was the twisted seam.
While the design was innovative and new, this still wasn’t enough to get the younger the generation to start jumping on Levi’s again. So, they did what any brand would do, hire ad agencies and famous directors to create viral marketing for their new line of jeans.
While Levi’s tapped into a few different agencies to help promote Engineered Jeans, Bartle Bogle Hegarty was the agency that helped make Levi’s popular with the youth again.
BBH had been making commercials for Levi’s since ‘82, working alongside famous directors like Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest and Under the Skin—two very iconic and important filmmakers that had used their creativeness to create commercials like “Drugstore” and “Kung Fu” for Levi’s—the score for Drugstore is actually pretty crazy and I’m absolutely obsessed with it.
Basically, BBH was in the perfect position to help create a new line of viral commercials that would get the youth excited about Engineered Jeans, and thus, giving Levi’s new life again.
In the early 2000s, BBH went on a pretty crazy run of creating variety of commercials for the brand. All of the commercials focused on promoting the twisted seams detailing while using sexual appeal to get the attention of the youth—a classic theme in the early 2000s.
Honestly, a lot of these commercials still rule today and are a lot of fun to revisit 20+ years later. Here are some of my favorites:
Flirt — Launched April 2001
Temptation — Launched April 2001
Twist — Launched November 2001
Odyssey — Launched January 2002
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Although Engineered Jeans are still very cool, they didn’t have a long lifespan. In the mid 2000s the skinny jeans took over, and suddenly Engineered Jeans just didn’t fit that current trend cycle, so Levi’s had decided to stop mainstream production.
Although Engineered Jeans weren’t around for long, they did get a pretty serious cult following as well as inspire denim companies around the world.
They did bring them back in 2019 for their 20th Anniversary, which focused on reworked styles of the 502 and 512, which I thought was pretty cool. Sadly, continued production for EJ is not common so your only real chance of getting up a pair for yourself is left to secondhand market. Luckily, there are plenty of options available for pretty good prices!
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