LEVI STRAUSS CEO MICHELLE GASS IS COUNTING ON WOMEN TO BOOST THE DENIM BRANDWITH HELP FROM THE BAGGY JEANS BOOM AND BEYONCÉ

OUTSIDE LEVI’S flagship store in New York’s Times Square, the sidewalks are teeming with tourists, buskers, and unauthorized Elmo impersonators.

- PHIL WAHBA

Inside, the store is teeming with mannequins. A shopper wandering down to the lower level is quickly surrounded by mannequins in T-shirts, mannequins in chambray shirts, and even mannequins in puffers—usually paired with the brand’s trademark jeans.

Not far from this mannequin armada—designed to suggest complete “looks” to shoppers—racks showcase denim dresses, aimed at drawing women to the historically male-catering brand. Some of those dresses might pair nicely with jean jackets: Levi’s clearly doesn’t mind the sometimes-derided “Canadian tuxedo” look.

Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Michelle Gass is, of course, a living human being, but clad in a dark-blue jean jacket and straight-leg black jeans, the self-proclaimed “denim head” blends in on the store floor. As she leads a tour, she draws a reporter's attention to a group of graphic T-shirts depicting Western vignettes with lassos and cowboys. “Our Western tops are having a moment right now,” she says. “I’m not sure this Western trend is going to last forever, but we want to be driving it.”

The wide range of merchandise and how it’s displayed show what Gass, who celebrated her first anniversary as CEO this January, has in mind for the brand’s future—and for helping Levi Strauss find a higher gear for growth. The flagship store itself symbolizes a major pivot: The company has begun to rely less on wholesale revenue from retail partners like Walmart, Target, and department stores and more on sales from its own stores and website—called the direct-to-consumer or DTC channel—the better to control its own destiny (and generate more profit) in the perilous apparel industry.