• New York Times, Marketing Daily, Friday, August 13, 2010 8:31 AM

It's casual dress day, right? Must be. Continuing on the denim theme, the Times' Stuart Elliott writes about Lee Premium Select, a new line of men's jeans that will sell for about $42 a pair, and Marketing Daily's Sarah Mahoney told us about Levi's women's jeans line, Curve ID, that was introduced this week.

The Lee Premium Select line is positioned between the Wranglers line sold by parent company VF and the trendy ones bearing designer labels. Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" is featured in a campaign for the product, as well as on a microsite, shopphobia.com, that takes a humorous approach to most men's aversion to shopping. In one TV spot, Rowe looks in a store window and says: "A hundred bucks for a pair of jeans? Give me a break."

"Jeans that fit right are like the Holy Grail for women," Mary Alderete, Levi's VP/global marketing, told Mahoney. "We analyzed women's bodies around the world, and did 60,000 body scans, and found that 80% of all women fall into three different body types."

Read the whole story at New York Times, Marketing Daily »