Levi’s Denim Gets a Fresh Look Thanks to a Latinx Designer

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Marisela Gonzáles Ginestra spends her days designing the final touches on Levi’s jeans, obsessing over details like colors, fading, whiskering and the perfect placement for rips and tears.

The iconic Levi’s Strauss & Co., founded in San Francisco in 1853, invented denim pants the way we know them today. But to survive, the company has to stay relevant. That’s where designers like Gonzáles Ginestra come in. She describes her work as “making sure that we have newness to this heritage garment.”

Last fall, some of her finishing touches were featured in an ad where global superstar Beyoncé walks into a laundromat, takes off the jeans she’s wearing and washes them with a bucket of diamonds. When she created the design a year prior, Gonzáles Ginestra had no idea it would be part of the singer’s campaign with Levi’s.

“Denim is a blank canvas and I can do whatever I want with it,” she said. “It’s my job to just take my canvas, that is a pair of jeans, and apply trends to it.”

Before landing at Levi’s six years ago, Gonzáles Ginestra designed everything from leather handbags for Kenneth Cole to bedsheets for teen boys at Pottery Barn. She worked on fashion shows for Paris Fashion Week and pajamas for a small family-owned company in the East Bay.

For years, however, Gonzáles Ginestra wasn’t sure she could craft a career in the fashion industry. Like many Latines in creative fields, she had no roadmap to follow and no role models she could identify with.

The 36-year-old grew up in a middle-class Mexican American family in San José that encouraged her to pursue a stable career. Designing clothes was not what they had in mind. But no matter how hard she tried, Gonzáles Ginestra couldn’t shake the artistic bug. She built a creative career that defied cultural expectations while helping other Latinx creatives along the way.

“Until I got to Levi’s, I really was often the one Latina in the room,” she said. “I say this for fashion, and I say this for every industry, we need to be everywhere, especially in consumer goods. No one is going to be able to speak up for us.”

Gonzáles Ginestra’s experience resonates with me as a journalist — another field where Latinos are underrepresented. Diversity advocates say things like, “You need to see it to be it,” but for many Latinx professionals, that’s a luxury we don’t have. We’re often told to dream big, which is great, but getting started — or charting a path — is often full of uncertainty.

Gonzáles Ginestra’s parents grew up in modest homes in the Central Valley, harvesting fruit and vegetables on farms alongside her grandparents. They were the first in their families to earn college degrees and later moved into the middle class.

It brought along a new set of pressures, Gonzáles Ginestra told me.

“We were the Mexican family in the affluent San José neighborhood. We weren’t allowed to look schlubby.”

That meant having her hair long and perfectly in place, and wearing clean, pressed — even if they were hand-me-downs. In high school, Gonzalez Ginestra longed to cut her hair short and wear all black, embracing an emo aesthetic that went against her parents’ wishes. Her mother taught her to sew, opening up her artistic sensibilities.

“I was the one emo kid on the Folklorico team, and I was up there with a fake bun in my hair because my hair was so short, I couldn’t put it in a high pony. We made it work,” she said.

“It was easier to be myself if I had control of making the clothes and making the look rather than just buying off the shelf. That agency really brought me peace. I fell in love with clothes and with shaping myself to be who I wanted to be rather than how someone else was telling me to be.”

After high school, she enrolled at UC Santa Cruz, where she was excited to take Chicano studies classes and, as she put it, “be radicalized.” And, as the first person in her family to attend a UC, just being there felt like an accomplishment. But within a year and a half, her enthusiasm dissipated when she realized reading books and writing papers was not how she wanted to spend her college years.

Her then-boyfriend, now husband, Alex Ginestra, encouraged her to transfer to the school where he was studying — the Academy of Art in San Francisco — to pursue fashion design. Her parents were opposed at first, but finally agreed after months of pleading and making the case that she would be able to find a job after graduation.

During her time in college, she landed an internship with Kenneth Cole and spent time in London, Paris and New York doing internships and short-term jobs before returning to the Bay Area. She eventually took a job with Pottery Barn, then worked for four years at Tart Collections, a local brand, until she was laid off in 2018, three months after returning from maternity leave.

While collecting unemployment and caring for her newborn, a recruiter called to say a denim company needed designers.

“I was like, ‘I have no denim experience, but I think my resume indicates I can do anything,’” she said. “It was a three-month sketch temporary gig, and now I’ve been here for six years.”

Representing Latine culture has been a big part of Gonzáles Ginestra’s work at Levi’s. For years, she led the company’s employee resource group for Latinos.

She also focuses on helping younger creatives find their footing in the fashion industry through mentoring and guidance. Young people often turn to her for encouragement or to fill the role model gap she experienced. The most important advice she offers is to speak up for themselves and their ideas in the workplace.

She had to unlearn some cultural habits, like not speaking unless spoken to and deferring to others in group settings — behaviors she learned in her Mexican family that she realized were not serving her at work.

“You can’t wait for someone to ask for your opinion in fashion. You have to say the thing. And if people agree with you, then they agree with you, and if they don’t, they don’t, but at least you said it,” she said. “I want to give young people a heads-up because if someone gave me a heads-up, I would have really appreciated it.”