For the last year and a half, Patrick Robison has been plotting the overhaul of Gap jeans. The result is the 1969 Premium Jeans line, which officially makes its debut today. The look that the brand's
evp of design was trying to capture, it appears, was the one he himself was exhibiting at a launch party in Los Angeles last week.
"Robinson, 42, was dressed head-to-toe in Gap denim with
his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his chest," Andrea Chang writes. "Many shoppers, he said, often felt they had no choice but to drop hundreds on premium denim because it's usually 'the only jean
that they can turn around and have a rock-star butt. And what we give them now is an even better rock-star butt -- at $59.'"
But there are skeptics about Gap's ability to turn around the
brand itself, which lost its cachet with "misguided merchandise offerings and too many stores." Eli Portnoy, a Los Angeles brand strategist, tells Chang that Gap is jumping on the bandwagon too late.
"Denim is still a good business, but it's a crapshoot for Gap because they're not leading the way," he says.
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