Levi’s Reversal on Gender in Ads

Today Sociological Images posted a Levi’s ad and a brief comment noting its classist subtext.  The text in the ad says simply, “This country was not built by men in suits.”

A few months ago, the bus stops here in NYC were plastered with the Levi’s “Wear the Pants” campaign, which promoted Levi’s khaki’s with a “real man” rhetoric and had more gender fail than I’ve seen in any other single ad.  The messages of the “Wear the Pants” campaigns were that the world needs men to be in charge, bringing protection and discipline to women and children; that to be a man one must work to gender conform, avoiding all things as potentially emasculating as lattes; and, that women and women’s rights have ruined men and the world.

Therefore, if I just saw the text of the new ad, I would have guessed it went with a Marlboro Man picture that suggested, “This country was not built by men in suits, which are delegitimized by their distressingly feminine associations with fashion, cleanliness, and the lack of manual labor, but by Real Men (TM), who get dirty, smoke, drink, and ride horses.  Oh, and wear blue jeans.” A new ad campaign that suggested, “America: isn’t it great?  Yeah, at least it was back when it was built.  By MEN,” would have been a natural extension of The World According to Levi’s.

So here’s the shocking thing: the image accompanying the text is probably of a woman, and both the woman and the probably parts of that are important.

First, to the extent the viewer sees the model as female, the message of the text and picture together becomes something like, “This country was not built by men in suits, who love money and themselves, but by free-spirited, patriotic individuals, some of whom were women.” Instead of the “city BOYS in suits v. real MEN in jeans” I would have expected from Wear the Pants, Inc., we get “MEN in suits v. WOMEN in jeans.” The same company that one ad campaign ago was gender policing men for eating salad is now spending money linking women to the generally masculinized memes of patriotism, frontier life/founding, and tough/outdoors/independent life. That. Is. Huge. I mean, I’m not going to throw them a parade, but this is a gender-progressive ad from a company that was aggressively gender regressive earlier this year.

(Aside: who wants to make fantasy versions for other gender regressive ads? The feminist version of hamburger commercials? Truck commercials?)

Now back to the gender ambiguity in the ad. I like that aspect for two very different reasons. One is just that, hey, the gender binary is culturally constructed and harmful in lots of ways, and anything that ditches it in favor of gender neutrality or gender transgression is a move in the right direction. The second is that, if this model is female, it is not obvious, and that is in part because she is not being sexually objectified. There are no curve-enhancing poses, no dramatic lighting or sexy props, no sultry eye-contact with the camera. It is a photo of a pale, skinny person’s back, and it may very well be a woman’s back, but it is not sexualized. A clothing brand. Using a topless woman to market its pants. Without using the woman as a sex object. Somebody call Hugh Hefner, because I say again, This! Is! Huge!

Yes, we are left with an anti-urban, pro-pseudo-agrarian, classist, flag-waving ad that may implicitly exhibit disturbing nativism, racism, and revisionism, but at least it’s not misogynist any more!

Well, some people may disagree with me there. After all, they do say, “This country was not built by men in suits,” not “people in suits” or “women in suits.” Does that suggest that only men do or should “wear suits” these days, i.e. work as lawyers, bankers, managers, etc., erasing the women in the white collar professions? But if they had used other language, would we have gotten the class message as clearly? What do you think, after the mountain of gender fail that was the Wear the Pants campaign, does this give Levi’s an official gender WIN?