Outside Levi’s flagship store in New York’s Times Square, the sidewalks are teeming with tourists, buskers, and unauthorized Elmo impersonators. Inside, the store is teeming with mannequins. A shopper wandering down to the lower level is quickly surrounded by mannequins in T-shirts, mannequins in chambray shirts, mannequins in sweatshirts, and even mannequins in puffers—usually paired with the brand’s trademark jeans.
Levi Strauss & Co. CEO Michelle Gass is, of course, a living human being, but clad in her dark-blue jean jacket and straight-leg black jeans, the self-proclaimed “denim head” blends in well on the store floor. As she leads Fortune on a tour, she draws a reporter’s attention to a group of graphic T-shirts depicting Western vignettes with lassos and cowboys, and to others illustrating the invention of blue jeans in 1873. “Our Western tops are having a moment right now,” she says. “I’m not sure this Western trend is going to last forever, but as it is happening, we want to be driving it.”
