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I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

Today we conclude our Denim Wars series. Now in our last episode we began to see the gradual decline of our denim giants.

Lee and Wrangler became one under the VF Corporation. While Levi's navigated its growing debt, meanwhile the entire denim industry is contending with the rise of ATHLEASURE.

A phenomenon fueled by the pandemic as folks turned to comfort in the midst of stay-at-home orders and then to top it off the entire country is changing.

Denim is starting to see a partisan shift in its audience. So are your genes in line with your political views and beliefs? What does that mean for the industry overall?

Well, to learn more, we're chatting with Kate Lamberton. She is Professor of Marketing at Wharton University of Pennsylvania's Business School and we'll be talking about how America's partisan divide affects the denim industry overall. That's coming up next.

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Professor Kate Lamberton of Wharton, thanks so much for joining us on BusinessWord.

Great to be here.

Before we dig into this, can you first lay out, what is this stuff about partisan shifts in consumerism? I mean, I think that a lot of people have a sense.

Did you see, by the way, the New York Times did a takeout where they showed people's refrigerators, and they asked readers to determine or try to identify whether this was a Trump voter or a Biden voter. Did you see that?

Yeah, I did. I did. It was great.

It was epic. Okay, let's try to do something with denim. Are there brands that are more associated with, say, a left of center ideology versus those more associated with the right?

Yeah, jeans are really interesting because they're so visible and because to some extent the brands have fostered these associations.

So, for example, we know that Levi's is associated with the West Coast. The West Coast tends to be more liberal. And so Levi's just by building their identity as a West Coast brand taps into it more liberal as opposed to conservative ideology.

On the other hand, you have Wrangler, which is associated with the rugged individualistic West, right, which may be more connected to a more traditionally conservative view.

There certainly are brand associations that pull the jeans in one way or another. And that's happened with a lot of different product categories right now. You see it and everything from shoes to food.

I'm fascinated that people, well, number one, care so much about brands, especially when it comes to denim because other than the Levi's tag there or something that might be, you know, a little patch that might be right around where the belt would be in the back.

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