Early Levi's Ad

Early Levi's ads were historic and fairly xenophobic. But the ads reached a peak of manly appeal in the 1950s, when the visuals focused on the man's butt with the signature red tab and portrayed an all-male world of bunkhouses, group showers, and horseplay. Small wonder that in the late '50s and '60s, both the underground biker culture and the underground gay culture (and yes, there was overlap) adopted Levi's jeans as the de rigueur uniform. The common use of predominantly white men shown in these ads doing “hard working” activities making them quite sexist and racist by design by implying that white men are the only people who do hard work and can wear Levi's jeans.