Jonathan Cheung

"it’s vital for designers to travel to develop empathy. Hanging out with other cultures in their countries and eating their food makes you understand people better. As Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Let’s aim for that."

It was grounded in a simple idea: to create a collection that embodies the cutting-edge innovation and sustainability technologies available...TOMORROWLAB’s philosophy is to make sustainability accessible for everyone.

"Waiting for a tested and proven eco-alternative solution to be shopped around the market doesn’t cut it anymore for brands with ambitious long-term sustainability goals to work toward. Brands are sending their designers, sustainability officers and R&D teams into the labs to accelerate innovations"

"He has a very modern way of approaching design. You don't get a lot of fashion sketches from him. He always comes in with so many ideas, which are often just words. Sometimes he writes them down on a piece of paper or sends them to you on iMessage or Instagram DMs. Then he goes on stage and improvises."

"You can wear them for years, often decades… What else do you wear that fades over time, gets ripped and repaired and looks better?"

"when you see the custom fits, it’s hard not to think that you are looking at a glimpse of the future"

"Pangaia has entered the world of denim"

“Our expectation is they’re going to be recycled by our grandchildren, 40, 50 or 60 years down the line"

"So, nettle denim is not simply a material story. It is a story about establishing means of wealth generation, gender equality, and environmental sustainability through social equality.."

"it's farm-to-table with the highest ingredients I can get"

"Levi’s denim designer credited with revitalizing the company’s appeal with shoppers young and old, Jonathan Cheung now consults with leading brands, material solutions providers and retail technology innovators"

"Shigeru Miyamoto is my design hero. The combination of retro cuteness, sense of humour and fun has been an inspiration. I’m convinced that playing Super Mario increases creativity and imagination"

"These chunky dad trainers from Levi's x New Balance have landed"

"to work with Tremaine Emory is to “work with a barometer of culture,” "his designs represent history, art and culture more than fashion trends. “Clothing is a reflection of the society, of its zeitgeist”

EDGAR talks exclusively to SVP of Levi's Design, Jonathan Cheung about collaborations, sustainability and why the brand remains timeless

"Before 2018, the American jeans market had been in decline for half a decade. Consumers turned to leggings, spurring many nervous whispers in the fashion industry about denim’s demise. Now, it’s clear that the death of denim was largely exaggerated. Not only is America getting a little bored of its black leggings, but jeans are back and, in many ways, bigger—and wider, skinnier, shorter, and more varied—than ever."

"Chewbacca is basically the Cindy Crawford of Wookiees”

"Collaborations help us stay close to the centre of culture"

Levi partnered with QQ Dance—a metaverse dance game with 350 million active players, that merges social media and dance—to create a wardrobe for the game’s characters, both virtual and physical clothing

LEVI’S® BY YOU, offers a line-up of Levi’s® fabrics and trims — leather, denim, corduroy, and Sherpa — for users to customize the Air Force 1 High, Air Force 1 Low, or Air Max 90

Christine Centenera & Josh Goot's WARDROBE.NYC x LEVI'S® RELEASE 04 DENIM

"In the last three fiscal years, sales doubled for tops, from denim jackets to graphic T-shirts, surpassing $1 billion for the first time in 2018"

"When this opportunity slid across my desk, my nose started to bleed"

"Wardrobe.NYC is the brainchild of Josh Goot and Christine Centenera, a Vogue Australia editor who also serves as a consultant to Kanye West’s Yeezy womenswear line and a stylist for Virgil Abloh’s line for Louis Vuitton"

"If you don't change the logo, what's changed? What you've changed is the meaning of the logo, and its connection and values"

"Heron Preston was born and raised in San Francisco, so he’s always had a soft spot in his heart for Levi Strauss, another native of the city"

"we wanted to do something different. To play with the familiar, the iconic, but to add a little touch of weirdness! We literally turned our concept inside out. The result is deeply otaku and beautifully strange"

"He namechecks Virgil Abloh, Elon Musk, Dieter Rams, Phoebe Philo. He talks of ‘coffee culture’ as if it’s a tableau in which to spot emerging movements. He adheres to what he calls the ‘Google formula’: curiosity + persistence = success; i.e. have an idea, and run with it."

“ When you look back five years ago, Levi’s was fundamentally an older man’s jean company, but now you see our clothes on teenagers, teachers and truckers – you name it. So I think that’s a reflection of Levi’s being relevant. I think for us its vital to think of ourselves as being engaged with culture. I think that’s where Levi’s resurgence and success has been, because we have become more culturally relevant in the last few years. A lot of that has been to do with working with young people… Show more

“ When you look back five years ago, Levi’s was fundamentally an older man’s jean company, but now you see our clothes on teenagers, teachers and truckers – you name it. So I think that’s a reflection of Levi’s being relevant. I think for us its vital to think of ourselves as being engaged with culture. I think that’s where Levi’s resurgence and success has been, because we have become more culturally relevant in the last few years. A lot of that has been to do with working with young people. The younger generation is the future. They are the early warning signals of culture and they will be the future culture.” Show less

"When you’re the head of design for the company that arguably wrote the playbook for good denim design, you might wonder what’s left to perfect"

"Welch went back and forth with Levi’s Creative Director Jonathan Cheung to bring ideas she already had in her head to life. She described her concept for the collection to me as “future vintage,” and I can see why"

"Denim, and Levi’s in particular has a strong relationship with culture. It’s culture and your place within culture that determines how relevant you are."

“ Look for the things where you'll learn the most—they are usually uncomfortable because the learning curve will be steeper. That's a good thing—it means most of your competition will also find it uncomfortable and give up”

“You have to have the mentality that you must adapt, and that staying still, even if you’re successful, will lead to irrelevance and eventually a decline. Hubris and complacency are your worst enemies. It’s not the strongest, or even the most intelligent that survive, but the ones that are most adaptable to change."

“ For Cheung, the aim is to grow brand relevance, which will benefit the company’s entire offering. “If you set your brand as a rocket ship, everything else will be pulled into the slipstream.”

"As Charles Darwin said, "It's not the strongest that survive but the ones that are most adaptable to change." So you have to be willing to change but keep your core identity and values as a common thread throughout"

“ Demna gave us a shopping list of jeans, shirts, and jackets, which we compiled and sent to Paris for him to play around with. Then it was emails, sketches and a lot texts”

“ For Jonathan Cheung, head of design at Levi’s, it’s simple: He wants to work with people he gets along with. People like Off-White founder/DJ/youth whisperer/Kanye West creative director Virgil Abloh. “I think that’s important in a collaboration,” Cheung says of the decision to co-create a Levi’s Made & Crafted capsule collection with Abloh. “We like each other.”

"During a quick meal at Levi’s innovation lab, Eureka in San Francisco, an intern walked over to speak with Cheung. “His name is Hector,” Cheung tells us. “He stands right in front of me and says, ‘You should work with this guy, Virgil.’”

Virgil: "Levi’s is just a super iconic brand. Levi’s denim jeans, how many brands on earth are there that were like an invention, but are still open to working with just a kid from Chicago who skateboards. What we did here is an experiment and it’s the first in a line of future projects."

Virgil Abloh: "The term “streetwear” for me is a genre of art and design that revolves around principles of irony, DIY and pop-culture. Levi’s is a perfect premise to play with all those concepts. Denim inherently has a reality to it, regardless of fashion. It’s pure workwear"

Virgil Abloh, "We hit this moment where fashion cried for an update. The fashion industry has been looking for something new. Ironically, it has come from the bottom up and not the top down.”

"This denim has been approved by some of the most skeptical, hardcore, authentic denim nerds on the planet. I bumped into some of our Cone Mills guys a couple of weeks ago and they had all switched to the 501 Stretch. My design team—the Denim Jedi—wear them."

"there was an "Oh, shit" moment when it dawned on me that Debbie Harry was wearing 505s. We knew the vintage 505s also looked amazing on girls, but Debbie Harry is like the ultimate proof. It was the realization that everybody has seen the 505, but not many people know its name or have ever pieced its history together. I mean, Sticky Fingers, The Ramones, Debbie Harry… Who doesn't want that jean?"

"“I can’t think of many items of clothing that can be worn, live a full life, and then get another life and even go up in value along the way,” says Jonathan Cheung, head of design at Levi’s, and he would know."

"Jeans were the first product that put the label on people’s radar, and somehow, in Gvasalia’s view, they never looked like Levi’s — “100 percent authentic.”...which led to Demna & Guram collaborating with Levi's

"The lab contains not only vats of indigo and an atelier where jeans are cut and sewn by hand. “It's totally 'Dior and I'

"Jonathan is perhaps my perfect interviewee. He knows his craft, he knows bespoke, and given his job, he’s very interested in the crossover between tailoring and more casual clothing"

"While showing us round the Innovation Lab, he discussed the challenge of improving upon possibly the most iconic piece of clothing in history"

“ Attacked from all sides by a surge of competitors, how is the 161-year-old pioneer of blue jeans reasserting itself?”