It's all down to LEJs

YOU can lead a kid to denim but you can't make him wear it, not if it's a pair of 501s. Fashion bunnies today wouldn't touch a pair of five-pocket Western jeans (think Eighties Kylie, Jason and Bros) with a Kevlar glove and manufacturers like Levi's have seen sales figures tumbling.

At last, the sleeping giant of denim has woken up and this month launches its new baby: Levi's Engineered Jeans.

Levi's is hoping shop assistants will be beating us off with sticks.

What happened to make Levi's have to reinvent itself? "We got lazy," says Robert Hanson, vice-president of marketing for youth category. "And didn't really want to pay attention to the signs on the horizon." It's not often a big corporate cheese says 'we were wrong', but Hanson couldn't deny it. After three years of falling sales and profits, 1998 saw the bottom fall out of the market. Profits were down 13 per cent in one year and in the space of two years Levi's closed 24 factories and laid off nearly 13,000 staff.

While Levi's suffered, labels like G-Star, Carhartt and Evisu, with their edgy cut and urban feel, tempted the trendsetters. At the same time Gap pushed khakis and cargo pants, munching away at Levi's share of the market.

Will the new LEJs start kicking khaki ass? The jeans were born when Hanson sent off his creative director, Caroline Parent, with a simple if daunting brief: "Go anywhere in the world, but come back in six weeks after you've reinvented the denim jean." She ended up in Tokyo and, six weeks later, came back with LEJs. Levi's refuses to say how much it has invested, but industry gossip reckons it's around $35 million.

So what's so special about LEJ's? At first glance they look like any pair of baggy jeans seen on bums in Hoxton and Notting Hill. Look a bit closer and you see the jeans are bigger and cut with a natural slouch. Then we get to the detail.

The little coin pocket has grown bigger.

Darts replace the yoke at the back and the once annoying signature twisted side seam has been incorporated into the legs and made into a feature.

Are LEJs just a copy of what 18-year-old boarders are wearing when they're frightening the bejesus out of grannies in the precinct? Yes and no. What Evisu, G-Star and the rest did was take Levi's original jean and update it.

They made it young, sexy and something that people wanted. Levi's has now done the same.

A rundown of detail may seem like a denim anorak's guide to fashion, but that's what gets our juices going. You can bang on about the 14oz denim in a new shade of indigo (natural dye) with its Tencel mix (gives it a worn, soft feel on the inside but retains the reassuring stiffness on the outside). The 11-piece range also includes a trucker jacket (64.80), T-shirts (25-30) and a pleat-back skirt (46.80). Jeans roll in at 54.

Can Levi's reinvent the wheel and bring us back to denim in our millions?

If LEJs are to turn Levi's fortunes around, they must convince kids it's cool to wear jeans again. In theory, we'll all have at least a couple of pairs of LEJs just as we did with 501s. Levi's hopes that LEJs will make up at least 10 per cent of its total denim sales in their first year.

For Levi's sake, we can only hope LEJs are all they're cracked up to be.

Let's hope they've learned one thing: when Tony Blair and Jeremy Clarkson are the most glamorous people wearing your jeans, move on.

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