From YouTube.
In 2010 every heritage brand sold the same edited nostalgia, workwear as costume with the hardship removed. Levi's had the strongest claim to that past and was turning into a museum of itself.
Refuse the past tense. Stop using a town as a backdrop and start using it as the client: shoot in Braddock, Pennsylvania, with its real residents, and put about a million dollars into rebuilding it.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Spending the campaign budget on an actual town instead of a set, and letting non-models in real ruins carry a global brand.
Smart: A denim campaign funding a dying steel town's library and farm looks like charity, until you see the money is the only thing stopping 'we are all workers' from collapsing into the nostalgia it attacks.
Only Levi's, with a genuine 1873 claim to American work, can say the work is not finished without sounding like it is renting the costume.
The investment makes the argument true, so the films read as reportage rather than fashion, and the claim cannot be called hollow because the receipts are in the town.
Hillcoat shoots it like bleak American cinema, not like a lookbook, so the hardship is observed, not styled.
Act-poweredIt works because it genuinely happened. Nothing as fiction. Has to be seen to work.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: