Ripped and Torn: Levi’s, Latin America and the Blue Jean Dream

Amaranta Wright, £10.99, Ebury Press It was the offer of a lifetime to a 26-year-old journalist hungry for adventure: to tour Latin America as a “cool hunter” – collecting a good salary and generous expenses while gathering information about the young and the hip. “I thought it was the job of the century,” she recalls. “I wasn’t thinking of what it meant. When I told anyone, they’d say, ‘Wow! How did you get that job?’” But the assignment rapidly became a nightmare: “It feels like I’m spying. Is it ideals that Levi’s has sent me to root out from these kids? Or weakness, vulnerability and doubt, as they find their footing in the world? Is this the stuff of my job?” Levi’s planned to use the information she gathered in the continent of her birth to help market the company’s products, and to entice the youth market through empathising with them, converting their ideals and hopes into consumer desires. The approach, Wright found, negated their everyday successes and struggles, and discounted the racism they face, the drug addiction rife on the streets, the effects of the neo-liberal economic model that paved the way for Levi’s entry into Latin American markets and consequently for her job. Her journeys crossed the Red Line used by Levi’s to symbolise areas too economically and socially based to be worth consideration and left her to reject corporate marketing. Her radicalisation has since led her to start a magazine, Bulb, a global issues and ethical lifestyle magazine for the teen market in the UK. “The seeds of the magazine were in my experience in Latin America,” Wright told OneWorld UK, after the London launch of her book in May. “It’s a way of providing a platform the visions and ideals and hopes I collected, that were disappearing into the corporate black hole.”

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