Interview with Sir John Hegarty

Launderette, first shown on Boxing Day 1985, and later Bath which featured a different male model soaking his jeans in the bath while wearing them, aimed to spearhead the company’s recovery. The soundtracks also soared in popularity. In one week in 1986, two Levi’s 501 soundtracks, Ben E King’s Stand by Me and Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman were both in the British charts. The all-important 16-24 year old male was the target for the advertisements. The campaign was meticulously planned. In just 12 months after the official re-launch of Levi’s 501 jeans, sales rose by 700%, doubling yet again the year after (Mort, 1996; 12). Sales were staggering, even though 501s were the most expensive jeans Levi’s produced. Factories struggled to cope with the demand, staff worked 12 hour shifts of overtime (Mort, 1996; 12). The basic design dated from 1873 but a TV commercial made 501s essential wear for 1980s Britain, along with boxer shorts, which became indispensable apparel for the new rebel, of whatever age. Levi’s jeans had entered other settings, becoming acceptable for middle-aged men, for example. Nothing distinguished the students from the lecturers when both wore jeans. An existing product, Dockers, was redirected at the older market, leaving 501s as a young person’s jean which could be personalised by shrinking, bleaching of tearing (Myers, 1999).
Branding and advertising in the 1980s created the ‘new man’, in touch with his feminine side, The Launderette used shamelessly homoerotic male body-worship imagery, and Kamen became the classic gay icon - the lone hero standing aside from mainstream society and, perhaps, looking down on it a little.
“There’s always the sort of circle that goes on, you know we find something incredibly fashionable our kids come along and they want to reject what we do, so there’s a sense of them finding their own identity. Of course what a jeans company has to do is somehow constantly identify with the emerging market, with the emerging teenage market. You’ve got to capture somebody in their youth but once you’ve got into a pair of jeans in your youth you kind of stay with them for the rest of your life because it’s like putting your youth on again. When you’re putting on a pair of jeans you really are putting on your youth. We have a very interesting relationship with jeans, it’s a very kind of deep psychological relationship in terms of what they mean, the fact that the more you were them the better they get. They are very particular to you, how you wear them even though they are all the same. Ostensibly, 5 pocket, Western jean, that’s what they are classically referred to as, but everybody has a sort of relationship with their jeans which is different from everybody else, how you wear them, what you put in the pockets, how the pockets therefore wear, how you rub them, what stage do you wash them, how often do you wash them, so its an incredibly organic product, and therefore your relationship with them is quite deep. So when you’re emerging as a teenager, when you’re emerging into adulthood, putting on your jeans is in a sense putting on your adulthood. That feeling that sense stays with you for the rest of your life. So it’s very important if you’re marketing jeans to market at that emerging market.” (Hegarty Interview)
I asked John Hegarty his views on whether The Launderette campaign had given permission to the mass market to wear denim. He replied:

“You’ve touched a nerve, there we had gone through the late 70s and early 80s, we called it the post punk phenomena where really what punk did, it blew all fashion apart. So that there was no fashion and you basically, as soon as something became fashionable it was out of fashion, it was anarchic, it was a completely anarchic period. To a large extent you followed whatever music you were into, you dressed like that particular band so you’d get people who were fans of Dexy’s Midnight Runners they’d be dressed like the band of Dexy’s Midnight Runners or you’d get Boy George fans who were literally dressed the way Boy George was dressed and then you got the new Romantics and all that sort of thing going on. So it was very difficult marketing to that group of people, completely fragmented. And then with the resurgence of people like Wham and bands like that, they began to get a more cohesive fashion look and people wanted a kind of look that they could all join in and everyone could be a part of. And laundrette was the thing that sparked that desire, because we presented a look, a feel, a style, an attitude that suddenly connected with the mid 80’s teenager, and they said that’s cool we can all buy into that, it’s very simple it can just be a T shirt a pair of 501s you can where them anyway you like and all of a sudden fashion became easy again. Whereas before that it was incredibly difficult I mean, God, fashion in north London was different from fashion in South London, what band you were into, what music you listened, where you went to school, where you went to college and it was a completely fragmented market up until that moment”. (Hegarty Interview 2004)