fromThe New Yorker
Source: www.gladwell.com
Topic: Fashion for Men
Sort Desciption: to men what's the point? How. on earth do you sell fashion to. someone ... could sell fashion to men. But. that was only the first of its ...
Content Inside: fromThe New Yorker July 28 1997 ANNALS OF STYLE Listening to Khakis What America's most popular pants tell us about the way guys think. by Malcolm Gladwell 1. In the fall of 1987 Levi Strauss & Co. began running a series of national television commercials to promote Dockers its new brand of men's khakis. All the spots-and there were twenty-eight-had the same basic structure. A handheld camera would follow a group of men as they sat around a living room or office or bar. The men were in their late thirties but it was hard to tell because the camera caught faces only fleetingly. It was trained instead on the men from the waist down-on the seats of their pants on the pleats of their khakis on their hands going in and out of their pockets. As the camera jumped in quick cuts from Docker to Docker the men chatted in loose overlapping non sequiturs- guy-talk fragments that when they are rendered on the page achieve a certain Dadaist poetry. Here is the entire transcript of "Poolman" one of the first- and perhaps best-ads in the series: "She was a redhead about five foot six inches tall." "And all of a sudden this thing starts spinning and it's going round and round." "Is that Nelson?" "And that makes me safe because with my wife I'll never be that way." "It's like your career and you're frustrated. I mean that- that's-what you want." "Of course that's just my opinion." "So money's no object." "Yeah money's no object." "What are we going to do with our lives now?" "Well ." "Best of all ." Voice-over "Levi's one- hundred-per-cent-cotton Dockers. If you're not wearing Dockers you're just wearing pants." "And I'm still paying the loans off." "You've got all the money in the world." "I'd like to at least be your poolman." By the time the campaign was over at the beginning of the nineties Doc ...
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