Levi’s, Legacy, and the Black Radical Imagination

What Beyoncé’s Levi’s moment tells us about class, culture, and the radical roots of American denim.

Written by Lucy Dover (@lucy_dover_)

At the end of March 2024, Beyoncé dropped Cowboy Carter, a Grammy winning album rooted in Southern Black identity, genre-bending rebellion and raw femininity. One of the most talked-about tracks? “LEVII’S JEANS.” Sultry, confident, and unapologetically hers, it’s more than a love song. It’s a nod to the cultural weight of denim. Just days after the album release, Levi’s changed their Instagram name to “Levii’s”, adding an extra ‘i’. By September, Beyoncé was the face of Levi’s Reiimagine campaign, positioning denim not just as a fashion staple, but as a symbol of freedom and self-expression.

This isn’t new territory for Levi’s. Back in 1985, their now-iconic “Laundrette” advert, where Nick Kamen stripped down to his boxers in a small-town laundromat, helped skyrocket the brand’s popularity. Sales in Europe rose by 800 percent. In 2024, Levi’s referenced the same ad, only this time, it wasn’t about sex appeal. It was about legacy. Beyoncé in Levi’s is a statement. A rich, powerful Black woman reclaiming a garment once tied to poverty, labour and protest.

Because before it was high fashion or a music video costume, denim was a uniform for resistance.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, denim became political. Activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) wore denim overalls as both a practical and symbolic choice. Writer Tanisha C. Ford referred to it as a “SNCC skin.” These weren’t just clothes. They were a commitment. Something you put on to signal solidarity with the people you were fighting for.

Overalls were cheap and tough. Perfect for long marches, sit-ins and rural voter drives. But the choice to wear them was also deeply intentional. Denim linked SNCC members to the working-class Black communities they were trying to uplift. At a time when earlier activists had been told to dress up in suits and Sunday best to appear respectable, SNCC flipped the script. They didn’t want to blend in with middle-class expectations. They wanted to stand with the poor, the rural, the forgotten.

For SNCC women, this shift was even more radical. Activists Anne Moody and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson gave up traditional femininity for function. Moody later wrote, “It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.” Denim overalls were a practical choice, but also a deliberate rejection of the aesthetic expectations placed on Black women. It allowed them to focus on the work, not appearances.

It’s important to remember that denim didn’t always carry such pride. For many Black Americans, jeans were once seen as a reminder of a not-too-distant past marked by labour and exploitation. “For many African Americans, denim workwear represented a painful reminder of the old sharecropper system. James Brown, for one, refused to wear jeans, and for years forbade his band members from wearing them,” says James Sullivan, author of Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon. What makes the SNCC overalls and Beyoncé’s denim moments so powerful is that they represent a conscious reframing of that history.

And it worked. Denim became a visual symbol of grassroots organising. Civil Rights activist Debbie Amis Bell put it plainly: “We used [denim] to identify with the sharecroppers which we were helping organise.” It was never about fashion for fashion’s sake. It was about power.

Today, Beyoncé’s Levi’s campaign may look slick and commercial, but it sits on top of a long and powerful history of resistance. When she sings about denim, she’s singing about inheritance. About Black Southern pride. About what it means to be seen, and to choose what you wear with intention.

Sources:

Levi's, “Chapter 1: “Launderette” reimagined with Beyoncé | LEVI’S®,” YouTube video, 0:30, uploaded September 30 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q40oimgnN00.

Levi Strauss & Co., “How Levi’s ‘Laundrette’ Ad Reignited the 501,” Levi Strauss & Co., November 19, 2020, https://www.levistrauss.com/2020/11/19/levis-laundrette-ad-reignited-the-501/.

Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp 68-70

Tanisha C. Ford, “SNCC Women, Denim, and the Politics of Dress,” The Journal of Southern History 79, no. 3 (August 2013) 

James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Gotham Books, 2006)

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi: An Autobiography. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968)