Levi's Little e Red Tab - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

The change was a logo standardisation, not a new product: the tab, the pocket stitching and the jeans continued, but collectors ever since have used the letter's case as the first dating test on any vintage pair. The photographs below show both sides of the tab and the label pairings that help date a garment.

The reason given is corporate identity, not manufacturing. The change was done to conform to the company's new housemark - the 'batwing' - which was adopted in 1967 and in which the word Levi's is meant to be the proper name of our founder, Levi Strauss. A proper name is written with one capital, so the Tab followed the housemark four years after the housemark itself changed. That lag is part of this page's usefulness: the batwing dates to 1967, but the Tab lettering that matches it dates to 1971, and a researcher dating a garment by its tab must use the tab's date, not the logo's.

A Reminder Before the Photographs

The historical record inserts a caution between the definition and its pictures: note that the Levi's red tab was not always on the pants - they started that in 1936. The sentence guards against the commonest misreading of the little e evidence. Absence of a tab does not make a pair post-1971 or pre-1971; it may make it pre-1936, or a style that never carried one. The case distinction only speaks when a red Tab is present to be read. This rebuild preserves the caution in the same position of honour the historical record gave it, ahead of the gallery, because on a page this short the caution is half the content.

The photographs themselves are documented with unusual candour. Below, historical descriptions say of its June 2017 Apparel Search photographs, is a photograph taken in June 2017; unfortunately we do not have a pair from 1971 to photograph at the moment, and we are NOT saying the label pictured was physically made in 2017 - they are the author's son's jeans and are a few years old. A closer look at the same label follows, and a view when flipping the label, the words upside down. Those photographs - the little e tab, both sides of the tab, and the related images kept from the historical record page - are carried in the gallery on the history page by reference. The honesty about the specimen is worth keeping: the page illustrates the current lettering with a family pair of jeans, and says so.

Photos