On Boxing Day 1985, British television viewers watched a young man in a T-shirt and Levi’s 501 jeans walk into a laundromat in small-town America, styled to look like the late 1950s or early 1960s. In front of the other customers, he took off his jeans down to his boxer shorts and put them in a washing machine.
The man was the model Nick Kamen, and the ad came from the agency BBH, which had won the Levi’s account in 1982. It was the idea of BBH cofounder John Hegarty, written with Barbara Nokes, and directed by Roger Lyons. The soundtrack was Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” a 1968 Motown single.
Its effect on sales is often described in huge numbers. Levi’s own history of the ad says that by some estimates sales rose about 800 percent afterward, and another account says the company sold more than two million pairs of boxer shorts in a year. Kamen went on to a music career and had a top-five hit, “Each Time You Break My Heart,” which he co-wrote with Madonna.
Campaign magazine later named it among the best ads of the previous 50 years. In 2006 it was parodied for Comic Relief, with David Beckham and June Brown recreating the scene in the same laundromat.
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