NEW MEDIA: SPOTLIGHT ON LEVI'S - Levi's seeks balance between the old and the new.(Levi Strauss and Co.'s Web site)

A new-look website recalls Levi's past and looks to the future, Alasdair Reid writes.

'The Levi's brand is all about innovation,' Helene Venge, Levi's digital marketing manager, says, explaining the thinking behind the relaunch of the Levi's European website. It comes complete with a split-screen divided by a bar across the middle and an innovative approach to navigation.

Innovation? It's true that Levi's has always been at the forefront of digital marketing techniques (the invention of I-Candy, the first commercial use of Shockwave, the first effective use of viral) but it's also true that there sometimes seemed to be a gap between the company's aspirations on the web and its image in the store.

Those with longer memories can remember a time not so very long ago when innovation wasn't exactly top of the Levi's brand value agenda - though ceaseless reinvention is clearly at the heart of the company's success over the past couple of decades.

Having established its global positioning as an anti-fashion statement at the heart of counter culture, Levi's left Woodstock behind during the 80s and repositioned itself (especially in Europe) as a classic US brand, signing up Nick Kamen and soul classics to reinvigorate its 50s Eisenhower-era heritage. It seemed to lie somewhere between Coke and Cadillac.

In recent years, it's been heading into weirder scenes - still on the wrong side of the tracks, of course, but desperately trying to leave cuddly old Bruce Springsteen visions of darkness at the edge of town and instead attempting to inhabit the edgier fashion/music scene owned by the likes of Jockey Slut magazine.

The problem is that it's been terribly hard to convey this sort of aspiration on the web. The previous site evoked a William Burroughs-type landscape - but got it hilariously wrong. 'The halogen glow from sputtering streetlights sucks shadows in and spits them out on dark anonymous sidewalks,' read the prose of one attempt to evoke desolate 3am streets. Sucks is the word.