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Levi’s blue jeans help ‘Hair’ return to the Great White Way

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When I had the opportunity to tour the Levi Strauss denim archives in San Francisco a few years back (where I had a chance to see early advertisements for the brand as well as some of the oldest known pairs of LS & Co. jeans including the early 501 style -- all tenderly handled by archivist Lynne Downey with white gloves), it struck me that the venerable brand wasn’t exactly doing all it could to emphasize its heritage -- and place in the world’s pop culture canon.

So it was heartening earlier this year when the company announced it had helped ensure that the denim in the Oscar-winning bio-pic ‘Milk’ was authentically of that time period.

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Now the company has gone one better and signed on as a sponsor of its first Broadway show -- the revival of ‘Hair,’ which opened on March 31.

According to the show’s costume designer Michael McDonald, 18 of the 26 cast members are clad in a range of Levi’s including reissued bell bottoms, boot fits and 501 straight leg styles, with costume inspiration culled from the archives of What Comes Around Goes Around, a vintage resale shop in Manhattan.

When I spoke to him yesterday, McDonald told me it was a natural fit since he had already used Levi’s extensively in the version of the show that was staged over the summer -- along with some Lee jeans and a Wrangler denim vest. And he said that although the denim subsidy knocked a couple thousand dollars off the costume budget and the brand was a visible sponsor, he made it clear from the outset that they wouldn’t be the only pairs up there on stage.

‘I felt a little pressure at first, but I made it clear I was not going to alter my design to facilitate using Levi’s on everybody,’ he said. ‘They really wanted me to use a lot of 501s, but I didn’t use them on everybody because there were other fits, washes and brands that worked better.’

One pair you will see up there is Levi’s 501s in a bleached-out ‘acid trip’ wash worn by ‘member of the tribe’ Brandon Pearson. ‘I already had him in a pair of jeans that were a different brand this summer that were very similar and that I’d bleached myself and that I needed to replace. Then I saw these acid trip 501s in the store.’

Which reminds me -- the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is coming up this summer. Sounds like the perfect time for a style called ‘the Flashback’: a mud-caked, bird-on-a-guitar-neck-embroidered, free-lovin’, limited-edition Woodstock wash 501 -- with a special red Levi tab that could be chewed on to induce psychedelic hallucinations. Are you listening Levis Strauss?

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-- Adam Tschorn

Top photo: Cast members in the Broadway revival of ‘Hair.’ Credit: Joan Marcus. Bottom photo: Levi Strauss acid trip wash 501 jeans. Credit: Levi Strauss & Co.

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