Levi's 'Backstory': Backsides, Doechii, and a 20-Year Return

Levi’s hasn’t run a Super Bowl ad in twenty years. The return, “Backstory,” is directed by Kim Gehrig and features James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” as the soundtrack to a film that shows its entire cast exclusively from behind. For the full runtime, the audience sees Levi’s jeans and the backs of the people wearing them — until the very end.

The campaign is called “Behind Every Original,” and the pun is doing real work.

The Creative Concept

The film opens on a pair of Levi’s — moving, dancing, climbing, striding — and then opens wider to show the specific people wearing them: Doechii in Low Slim Boot cut jeans, Questlove in 505s, NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in 578 Baggy jeans, K-pop star Rosé, model Stefanie Giesinger, and — memorably — Woody from Toy Story, whose Levi’s-adjacent denim shirt becomes a retroactive piece of brand history.

The reveal structure — show the jeans, then show the person wearing them — is borrowed from a classic advertising device: the product reveals the person. But the inversion here is that the jeans reveal characters whose faces we already know. We recognize the walk before we see the face. The jeans are doing the identification.

Kim Gehrig’s Direction

Gehrig — who also directed Nike’s “So Win” for this same Super Bowl LX cycle, making her arguably the most prominent director of the 2026 Big Game — brings a documentary energy to the brand roster. The celebrities in “Backstory” are not posing. They are doing their thing. The camera catches them from an angle that removes the performance of fame and shows, instead, how they move.

The choice to shoot from behind is formally daring in a way that the creative industry talks about a lot and actually does very rarely. It denies the audience the faces that celebrity advertising typically depends on for its emotional punch. What it offers instead is movement, posture, and presence — which, it turns out, are often more individual and more revealing.

Doechii’s final turn — revealing herself to the audience after the build — lands because of what precedes it: you’ve been told something true about how she moves before you’re shown who she is.

James Brown’s Soundtrack

“Get Up Offa That Thing” is a song about movement — specifically, about the kind of movement that comes from getting out of your own way. As a soundtrack for a campaign about people who push culture forward by refusing to stand still, it is not subtle. But effectiveness does not require subtlety. The track’s imperative energy drives the edit’s rhythm, which drives the audience’s physical response.

Music in advertising works most powerfully when it is also an argument. James Brown arguing for movement while Levi’s-clad originals move through the frame is an argument the audience’s body makes before their mind catches up.

The Return Context

Levi’s returning to the Super Bowl after twenty years is a statement about where the brand sees itself in the cultural landscape. Denim has had a complicated decade — cycling through revival and irony and nostalgia and back again — and Levi’s needed a statement that placed the brand in the present tense rather than the archive.

“Behind Every Original” achieves this by attaching Levi’s to people who are definitively current: Doechii’s Grammy win was recent, Gilgeous-Alexander’s MVP was recent, Rosé’s global visibility is ongoing. The jeans become evidence that the present’s originals still choose Levi’s.

The Woody Moment

The Toy Story character’s inclusion is the detail that resolves any ambiguity about whether the film is taking itself too seriously. Woody has been wearing what is recognizably Levi’s-influenced denim since 1995. His appearance confirms that the definition of “original” in this campaign is generous enough to include characters who are fictional, beloved, and permanent fixtures of American pop culture.

It also makes the room laugh, which is the correct thing for one moment in a Super Bowl ad to do.

Client: Levi’s Director: Kim Gehrig Music: “Get Up Offa That Thing” — James Brown Cast: Doechii, Questlove, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Rosé, Stefanie Giesinger, Woody (Toy Story) Year: 2026