What, No Music? Claire Cozens on the New Levi's Campaign

Ever since Nick Kamen's famous laundrette striptease breathed new life into Marvin Gaye's classic track I Heard It Through The Grapevine, the music industry has been embroiled in a love affair with Levi's advertising. From Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman to Shaggy's Boombastic, dozens of tracks have shot to the upper reaches of the charts on the coat-tails of Levi's iconic 501 campaigns. By the early 1990s being featured in a Levi's campaign almost guaranteed a best-selling record, and record companies were practically begging advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty to use their artists.

So it will come as something of a shock to sales-hungry music executives to learn that the eagerly awaited new campaign for Levi's 501s - the first since 1998 - contains no music at all. Instead, in a first for the brand, the advertising is entirely built around dialogue, with groups of hip-looking kids in their late teens and early 20s flirting and arguing about their jeans.

The campaign promotes the relaunch of 501s, which Levi's stopped advertising in 1998 after an astonishing 13 years of dominating the airwaves with fifties-inspired boy-meets-girl mini-epics set against an instantly recognisable soundtrack. The look had become dated, and young people began to think of Levi's 501s as the tight-fitting jeans worn by their parents, middle-aged motoring presenters and even the prime minister. Hip they weren't.

The new 501s are designed to appeal primarily to under-25s - gone are the unfashionable, eighties-style high waists and narrow legs, in favour of a lower-cut, looser style. But if Levi's is to interest young people in what remains its most famous brand, it needs to convince them 501s have changed - and that means a radically different approach to the advertising.

"Levi's advertising has always been about big narratives and big music," says Stephen Butler, creative director at Levi's advertising agency BBH. "We'd never done dialogue in the past - we handle the European advertising and with the language barriers, it had never seemed prudent to do so. But the regeneration of the brand called for something different.

"It's about as big a shift as you can get in terms of the brand. We're trying to move the Levi's perspective from 'will this be a number one in the charts?' to something much more street level, using real kids, and moving away from a model-oriented casting to people from that environment and street vernacular."

Butler admits the move is risky. By not using music to promote the brand, Levi's is missing out on all the free publicity surrounding a hit record - when Shaggy got to number one with Boombastic, the line "as featured in the Levi's ad" even appeared on the poster for the record.

But Paul Trynka, editor of the music magazine Mojo and author of Denim, a history of jeans, believes it will pay off. "People forget that Levi's were the first to inspire records being re-released after being in an advert. But I think that's run its course, it's become very cliched, the last resort of every ad man," he says.

"Relaunching 501s is a brave move. Over the past few years they've been a real back-catalogue product - you get very hip people wearing reissued 501s from the 1940s, but the 501 that's been on general sale has been much more reminiscent of the 80s and 90s than the classic period of the 40s and 50s. It's always been a classic part of Levi's history but it came to look quite dated."

Trynka believes Levi's decision to keep 501s off the airwaves for so long is key to their future success. He compares it to the Beatles, who were deeply unfashionable in the 1970s but later enjoyed a comeback. "Hopefully people will have had time to forget about middle-aged men stuffed into tight jeans," he comments.

But why bring them back at all? After a few years in the fashion wilderness, Levi's has regained its credibility thanks to the launch of new brands such as its ergonomic Engineered Jeans, designed to follow the curves of the human frame. Isn't relaunching a tired brand just asking for trouble?

"We did some work with the Henley Centre last year," says Kenny Wilson, European marketing director for Levi's, "that showed the prevailing zeitgeist is for consumers to feel more uncertainty than ever before: about the economy, war. Even young kids were experiencing more anxiety.

"In that world of uncertainty, people are looking for things that feel real and authentic. So our starting point was: 'Which jeans articulate that?' And 501s were the obvious answer. We always felt we'd go back to them at some stage, because one of the things that makes Levi's unique is that it's the original jeans brand.

"501 advertising started in 1985 and the last really compelling campaign was in 1997. So the average 15-year-old doesn't know the advertising at all. And through our other brands a lot of young people have seen that Levi's can be a product for them. Historically 501s have evolved at least once a decade anyway, it's like when you update a car - you modernise it, but it's still recognisable."

Rita Clifton, chairwoman of the branding consultants Interbrand, believes the time is ripe for a revival of 501s. She points to the success of brands such as Lacoste, which after its heyday in the 1980s had seemed irredeemably naff, but is now enjoying a comeback.

"There is a very strong trend towards authenticity at the moment. The coolest trainers are the retro styles, and even brands like Gola, which were written off in the 1970s, are becoming cool again. It's all part of the cycle of life," she says.

The idea for the latest campaign came out of the famously unfitted cut of 501s, originally designed in the 1800s for maximum economy of fabric rather than style or fit. From that sprang the idea for a series of short, comical films focusing on the way in which young people talk about their clothes and use them to avoid conforming - hence the new catchline, "anti-fit".

In one, a young man dressed in baggy jeans and trainers goads a bemused, smartly-dressed bouncer outside a club by explaining exactly why he won't get in while pointing at his clothes. Another has a Levi clad character in a fast food bar ordering a hot dog and then reaching for the chocolate sauce, to the waitress's horror. The third shows two men, one dressed in baggy Levi's, the other in tight trousers, arguing furiously in Spanish about which looks better - the clear implication being that the baggy jeans are by far the more stylish option.

"We auditioned 1,400 kids, looking for someone who would bring a spark and some personality to it, and we relied on templates rather than complete scripts because the dialogue had to be authentic," says BBH's Butler. "For any brand that's a risky thing to do because you're ceding control. But I think it gives a newness and a dirtiness, they're like little scenes plucked out of a movie."

In one sense, the new campaign is not that different from the old 501 advertising, which has always starred non-conformists. As Butler says: "There's no big new message, it's about rebellion, which is really what 501's have always been about."