LOS ANGELES – For the last 18 months, the folks at Levi Strauss & Co. studied women around the world, conducting thousands of interviews and looking at 60,000 body scans of women in 13 countries.
The company says the result – besides confirmation that for women, jeans shopping ranks right up there with buying bras and bathing suits – is a new global denim program that, by taking their curves into account, will provide nearly any woman a five-pocket pair of jeans that feels custom fit to her shape.
Called Curve ID, the line officially launches on Sept. 2 and consists of three fits: a slight curve (for the woman who finds that regular jeans “fit in the hips and thighs but are too tight in the waist”), a demi curve (if your jeans “usually fit in the waist but don’t flatter the figure”) and a bold curve (if jeans “fit in the hips and thighs, but gap in the back”).
“The fits that we’re launching with account for 80 percent of the women’s body shapes in the world,” boasted Levi’s president Robert Hanson in a phone interview last week.
“And when we launch the fourth one – our most extreme curve – at the end of this year or early next year, then we’ll have 96 percent of women covered.”