RED WHITE & DENIM

LEVI STRAUSS & CO., THE MOST QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN BRAND, IS SUDDENLY HOLDING THE TORCH FOR AMERICA ITSELF.

- BY JEFF BEER

BLUE COLLAR BOSS

Levi's CEO Michelle Gass's first jobs included bagging groceries and working in a factory.

WHEN LEVI’S CEO MICHELLE GASS WAS IN JAPAN last summer, she and chief product officer Karyn Hillman wandered down the street from the brand’s store in Tokyo's trendy Harajuku neighborhood to a small, unassuming vintage shop called BerBerJin. They took the stairs down into its cavernous basement, where it keeps racks and racks of its best denim finds, and began the slow, laborious task of searching for treasure. A couple of hours later, Gass walked out with a pair of 1947 vintage 501s and an even rarer 1952 trucker jacket.

“We tried on so many, many pairs of jeans,” Gass tells me over coffee in her San Francisco office in September. “You appreciate the nuances and beauty of denim, how it ages and how it’s worn. There are these incredible finishes that come as a result of people wearing it for 70 years. It’s so special.”

It’s the kind of experience that can only happen in Japan. When American Levi's factories began modernizing their denim production lines in the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese collectors came to America to buy up as much vintage and deadstock denim as they could. (Japanese manufacturers bought the antique shuttle looms, sparking homegrown brands like Big John and Studio D’Artisan.) Levi’s created its Levi’s Vintage Collection—new replicas of historical designs—in the country in 1996. Recently, Levi’s cemented the relationship further, launching its “Made in Japan” Blue Tab collection, a premium line of trendy takes on classic Levi’s designs, last February.