Sunday, February 3, 2008

Levi's 501 Commercial (Version with Gay Men)

The ad I've selected is a commercial for Levi 501 Jeans.  You can see the video on YouTube by clicking here.  Basically, the ad shows a man in his hip apartment changing into a pair of jeans.  As he is lifting the jeans up around his legs, the floor shakes and we see elements of the streets pop up through the floor, including a man in a phone booth.  The first man lowers the jeans and the stuff that popped out of the floor lower too; he smiles and then yanks his pants up to his waist and his apartment is entirely replaced by the city street.  He looks over the man in the phone booth, smiles, and they walk off together.

There are many elements of this ad to analyze, but for the sake of brevity I will only mention the few I think are important (I know we're only supposed to mention one, but I jcouldn't choose just one).  Having the empty apartment replaced by the bustling city street with the putting on the jeans implies that they will catapult you into social situations where you can meet new people and, potentially, an attractive male mate.  Also, the iconic blue jean and plain white t-shirt combination that the main character is wearing conjures up notions of a simple, no-frills kind of man, which is saying that we don't have to be the most fashionably savvy men to wear their jeans.  Lastly, what's truly interesting for me about this commercial is that there was another version of this commercial with a woman instead of another man in the phone booth (everything else was the exact same except the person in the phone booth); this version of the commercial I've posted is one I found on BravoTV and can only obviously succeed there because it reflects its prominently progressive audience of women and gay men.

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