Add to kart
The soapbox derby scene of Seventies San Francisco inspires one of the sunniest collections of the summer
In 2018, a pair of second-hand Levi’s sold at auction for nearly $100,000. Originally purchased by Solomon Werner, an Arizona shopkeeper, in 1893, they had been in storage for almost all of the 125 years that followed. Werner was a wide, tall man — 44in waist, 36in inseam — but that didn’t dissuade the buyer.
As a maker of clothes, Levi’s sits in an enviable position: it’s both an inclusive outfitter and a niche brand. Founded in 1853 — in San Francisco, by German Levi Strauss — in the 19th century, Levi’s dressed the people of the American frontier. In the following centuries, Levi’s have been worn by every youth movement and subcult you could care to name. Last spring, the company was floated on the stock market and valued at $8.6bn — and Levi’s has estimated that worldwide it sells one of its logo T-shirts every second.
But denim-heads still love and respect the brand, thanks in no small part to Levi’s Vintage Clothing (LVC), a small, vaguely indulgent sub-brand.
“It’s amazing,” says Paul O’Neill, head of design at LVC. “Now it’s been around so long and it’s kind of taken for granted, but I remember when I first found out about Levi’s Vintage Clothing as a consumer, I was blown away.”
Twice each year, O’Neill and his team create a small selection of clothes inspired by a cultural moment. Previous collections have reimagined California’s post-war surf scene, Greenwich Village in the Sixties, the Space Race, the Summer of Love ’67, the Jamaican Rockers of the late Seventies and, naturally, the Old West. Thanks to extensive research, the resulting garments are as true as possible to the originals that inspire them.
Around two years ago, a friend gave O’Neill
a photograph of a man in a jacket with the phrase “San Francisco artists’ soapbox derby” written across the back. It piqued the designer’s interest. The photo was a still from a film made about one of the more surreal events in the San Franciscan summer of 1975. To mark the local Museum of Art’s transition into the city’s Museum of Modern Art, the gallery hosted a soapbox derby in John McLaren Park. Seventy-nine artists applied to create go-karts that would descend an 800ft slope lined with some 4,000 spectators.
There were tumbleweeds, flying saucers, a driftwood two-seater and a kart made of chicken wire and bread. Artist David Best created “St Theresa’s Vision”, a kart decorated with a statue of St Theresa, borrowed from Grace Slick.
“That [photo] was all we could find about it, so I contacted the museum and they let me go to their archives. They had all these amazing slides and imagery and pamphlets and original ephemera to do with this race,” he says. After two days in the archive, everything was scanned and organised to form the basis of “Soapbox”, the LVC spring/summer 2020 collection.
It transpired that the event was part-sponsored by Levi’s, and as it was mid-Seventies San Francisco, pretty much everyone was wearing the brand. O’Neill was able to find exact or near pieces in the company’s archive and replicate them.
“There was a lot of bootcut jeans, a lot of flares,” he says. “They’re all wearing [them] quite cropped, with a short inseam. A lot of hiking boots, striped T-shirts. It was all Bay Area artists, so there’s quite an eclectic mix… and a lot of people were dressed for the race so there’s some elaborate suits. But the colours were beautiful pastel shades and washed-out tones against black and white racing stripes, and we tried to combine all of that [in the new collection].”
Each LVC collection is accompanied by a shoot that uses street-cast models to depict the clothes in their historical context. For Soapbox, bedraggled types were dressed in pastel patchwork jackets, boxy, camp-collar shirts and dungarees in heavyweight, pre-shrunk denim.
The highlight of the collection for many is the “Fresh Produce” bomber jacket in “apricot yellow” corduroy, an exact replica of a jacket from the original Fresh Produce capsule collection, which was designated by a little carrot label stitched onto each garment.
Next, AW ’20 will see LVC’s “No Fun” collection, based on Eighties’ post-punk from Kentucky. Another scene, fittingly recaptured in denim. ○