Levi’s - Legacy

In 2011, Levi’s released Legacy, a 60 second film directed by Berlin based filmmaker Ralf Schmerberg as part of the brand’s global Go Forth campaign. Rather than selling jeans through product or fashion, the film sells an attitude. It is restless, youthful and idealistic, built around the belief that a generation has the possibility, and perhaps the responsibility, to shape the world around it.

Shot across Germany, from Berlin to the Baltic Sea, Legacy moves through a collection of fleeting encounters and charged moments. Young people run, swim, dance, protest, work and gather together. The images feel spontaneous rather than staged, with handheld camerawork, available light, imperfect framing and rapid transitions giving the film the energy of something discovered rather than constructed.

At its centre is Charles Bukowski’s poem The Laughing Heart, spoken in the film by actor Gary Farmer. Bukowski’s words provide a surprisingly intimate counterpoint to the physical intensity of the images. The poem is about taking ownership of one's life, recognising opportunities and refusing to surrender to passivity. Schmerberg turns those ideas into a visual stream of movement, faces, bodies, landscapes and collective energy.

What makes Legacy particularly memorable is the way it avoids the polished language normally associated with global fashion advertising. Schmerberg’s camera seems to chase the action rather than control it. The film has the feeling of a road movie, a documentary and a music video compressed into a single minute.

There is a deliberate tension between the roughness of the imagery and the scale of the message. The protagonists are not presented as celebrities or conventional advertising models. They appear as ordinary young people caught in moments of possibility. The result is less about individual identity than about a collective state of mind.

This was also a defining moment for the Go Forth campaign, which Levi’s had introduced in 2009. Earlier work had drawn on Walt Whitman, while Legacy shifted towards Bukowski and a darker, more contemporary poetic voice. The campaign was developed by Wieden + Kennedy, with the film produced by RadicalMedia, and marked Levi’s first global advertising spot for the platform.

The film originally premiered through Facebook, an important choice in 2011, before moving into cinemas and television. Levi’s positioned the campaign around the idea that young people could become pioneers and contribute to positive change. The film therefore sits somewhere between advertising and manifesto.

Its final invitation, “Go Forth”, is almost deliberately simple. After a minute of movement and emotion, the words function less like a conventional advertising slogan than a command to participate. Schmerberg understands that the power of the film lies not in explaining what the viewer should believe, but in creating a feeling that something is about to happen.

More than a decade later, Legacy still feels recognisable because its visual grammar has become widespread. The handheld camera, rapid montage, natural light and mixture of documentary realism with highly emotional imagery have since become familiar tools of contemporary advertising. But here they still feel fresh. Schmerberg uses them to capture something elusive: the sensation of being young, restless and convinced that life can still be changed.

The jeans themselves are almost incidental. What Levi’s is really selling is momentum. A life lived rather than observed. A generation moving forward together. And, in Bukowski’s words, the simple idea that your life is your life.