A hundred and thirteen years later, Levi Strauss &

Could the firm possibly have known that only a few years hence one in seven American men would own at least one pair of Dockers? Or that casualness – from the living room to the boardroom — would become the international style standard?

Yet there is also a sartorial heritage with Dockers, which this brand-attuned site not only pays homage to, but elevates to a central theme. “Make history. Don’t fake history,” enjoins the splash page. You can achieve this by being the first ever to do something while wearing Dockers, taking a video of it, and submitting it to the site. Steve McQueen may have been the first to stage a great escape from a German prison camp while clad in chinos, but why not — like some dude named Marco Theodorou — be the first to power-wash a pedal car while wearing Dockers? Or, as other videos on the site portray, the first ever to play mini table tennis atop the Eiffel Tower, or moonwalk across a famous bridge?

Broadband clothes get broadband treatment online. That Dockers wearers have high-speed Internet connections is assumed, and Flash is used to make the most of this fact for fun and practical purposes (and often both). The interactive elements, however, are strictly non-cumbersome (each major section takes fewer than 10 seconds to load), and showcase Dockers in a medium-maximizing way. However, the entire site relies on pop ups, and therefore may be un-viewable to anyone with net savvy who has disabled this charming feature of the Internet. Easily fixable, Dockers should not rely on the user to reconfigure his browser to view its site.

The product catalog is presented as two spiral-bound notepads, one above the other. You match shirts and trousers by flipping the respective pages, and the tongue-in-cheek descriptions vividly evoke the Dockers brand values: “Whoa now…take it easy, this linen shirt will take you places you’ve never been before…. 100% cotton regular fit pant with easy care (which means the iron just has to look at them to flatten those creases).” Or pair that linen shirt with the “distorted single welt pockets – perfect for getting down and dirty with at a quarter past too late.” Once you’re outfitted with the basics, Dockers introduces accessories. The Columbus Bag: “If they’d been around then, Columbus probably would have bought one. But they weren’t so he didn’t.” Or the Apache Bag: “A more compact bag for your more compact stuff…we won’t ask what that is.” For a clothing website, this qualifies as well-wrought wit, and it speaks the brand’s language with evident thoughtfulness and care.

Other facets of eu.dockers.com: You can download (“grab” is the brand-centric word employed on the site) the pen-and-ink illustrated “Heroes” screensaver, with quotes from the likes of Nelson Mandela, Yuri Gagarin and Ernest Hemingway. You can “Free your friends” and open your mates’ eyes “to a world beyond spreadsheets and sensible shoes” by emailing a message containing your Dockers recommendations for them. Or you can find a store, a feature that exceeds the typical by allowing the user to verify that the Dockers he’s questing after is sold at a given outlet.

The entire site, down to the most minute detail, has a relaxed and unscripted feel. Labels and tabs are made of masking tape, and all lettering is handwritten (even the user’s own typed entries appear in a hand-drawn screen font). The navigation, too, fulfills the brand. Dialogue boxes spring open to look like sheaves torn from a notebook, and when closed down, crumple up as if being binned by invisible hands. Naturally, the pop-up windows don’t have a machine-made “CLOSE” icon in the corner; they have a scrawled “Forget it.” And instead of the ordinary “CONTINUE,” the other button says, “Done that – next bit.”

Like the clothing line it supports, the Dockers Europe website offers comfort and style. It is never underdressed or overdone. With an inventive and attentive blend of design, features and copy, it sews up the Dockers brand online in authentic pixelated khaki.