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Manifesto for a study of denim*

2007; Wiley; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.0964-0282.2007.00024.x

1469-8676

Daniel Miller, Sophie Woodward,

Global trade, sustainability, and social impact

Social AnthropologyVolume 15, Issue 3 p. 335-351 Free Access Manifesto for a study of denim* Daniel Miller, Daniel Miller Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UKd.miller@ucl.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorSophie Woodward, Sophie Woodward School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU, UKsophierose.woodward@ntu.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author Daniel Miller, Daniel Miller Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UKd.miller@ucl.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this authorSophie Woodward, Sophie Woodward School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU, UKsophierose.woodward@ntu.ac.ukSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 June 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0964-0282.2007.00024.xCitations: 27 * We would like to thank Louise Crewe and Alex Hughes, and the two anonymous reviewers for comments on a draft of this paper, Mylene Mizrahi for sharing her Brazilian data and introducing Danny to Brazilian Jeans and funk balls, and Magda Craciun for giving him a tour of Istanbul fake brands. Also very helpful were discussions during an earlier abortive grant proposal with Fiona Jane Candy, Jo Entwistle and Clare Harris. AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract This paper considers the challenge to anthropology represented by a topic such as global denim. Using the phrase ‘blindingly obvious’, it considers the problems posed by objects that have become ubiquitous. While there are historical narratives about the origins, history and spread of denim, these leave open the issue of how we make compatible the ethnographic study of specific regional appropriations of denim and its global presence in a manner that is distinctly anthropological. Ethnographies of blue jeans in Brazil and England are provided as examples. These suggest the need to understand the relationship between three observations: its global presence, the phenomenon of distressing and its relationship to anxiety in the selection of clothes. As a manifesto, this paper argues for a global academic response that engages with denim from the global commodity chain through to the specificity of local accounts of denim wearing. Ultimately this can provide the basis for an anthropological engagement with global modernity. Why denim? To claim that denim is an appropriate subject for a manifesto may at first appear frivolous, almost a parody. The word ‘manifesto’ is generally acceptable with respect to either some critical political or social agenda, or alternatively a philosophical or art movement. By contrast, we propose a particularly anthropological field for the manifesto, based on anthropology's belief that philosophical insight can be grounded in the experiences of ordinary people as observed through ethnography. So, an anthropological manifesto will be one that makes manifest what otherwise is implicit in the practice of populations. The term ‘manifesto’ is justified by the evidence presented in this paper that denim is such a grounded analogue to philosophy; one that is employed by populations to resolve major contradictions of living within the modern world and associated forms of anxiety. Our manifesto is a call to make manifest the profound nature of that response. It is pitched against the established philosophical sense of ontology that assumes being always resides in depth, and that things of the surface, such as clothes, are intrinsically superficial, a concept of being that is by no means shared by all peoples (Miller 1995). The term manifesto is also justified by the claim that global phenomena require a new form of global anthropology. In the conclusion we will call for an anthropology based not on a single project or author, but a larger communal movement of academics that emulates the global nature of the object of enquiry. This should complement more established approaches such as the ethnography of the local appropriation of global forms, or multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). But why of all things denim – blue jeans? Denim is clearly a global presence, it not only exists in every country in the world, but in many of these it has become the single most common form of everyday attire. In preparing this paper we counted the proportion of persons wearing denim blue jeans out of the first hundred to pass by on random streets in sites such as Istanbul, London, Rio, Manila, Seoul and San Francisco. This proportion ranged from 34% to 68%, suggesting that soon, at any given moment, more than half the world will be wearing this single textile. Although there are many other global forms, ranging from foods such as Coca-Cola through to car brands, we will argue that denim is special, being as much a refusal as an acceptance of capitalist pressures such as fashion. Also, a major part of the explanation of its growth is that it connects intimacy and personalisation to ubiquity in a manner that is perhaps unique, even within the genre of clothing. How should anthropology, and especially material culture studies, respond to phenomena that seem intended in their own right to create bridges between the most personal and the most global? We are not seeking to rehearse all the prior anthropological debates on global issues, which have ranged from much earlier concerns within economic anthropology such as formalism against substantivism, to more contemporary debates about globalisation per se. It does, however, seek to reverse one trend: the tendency to cede the terrain of accounting for global phenomenon to a meta-sociology, and the habit of citing upwards to figures from Giddens to Bauman, from Beck to Baudrillard. This may lead anthropology to be constructed in opposition to meta-sociology as an appeal to the most parochial and specific as exemplified in ethnography. Anthropology is thereby reduced to cultural relativism; the degree to which a particular population does or does not correspond to any given sociological generalisation. Instead, anthropology needs to construct its own form of generalisation, or meta-commentary, about the contemporary world. In our response this is composed of ethnography rather than opposed to it. The approach we are suggesting is very different from that of others, which interrogate the global from within their discipline's own intellectual constructs, such as claiming that there is, for example, a global post-modernity (Hutcheon 2002). In meta-sociology, the observation that the majority of the world's population might wear the same thing is likely to lead to an appeal to some grand trend of modern life: the dynamics of capitalism perhaps, or the rise of individualism. Anthropologists, by contrast, would expect to negate such contentions through ethnographies that demonstrate that, in each instance, people wear denim for reasons specific to that particular context. Even the terms used by meta-sociology, such as ‘capitalism’ and ‘Americanisation’ (Campbell et al. 2004), would be subject to anthropological claims that we actually confront plural capitalisms (e.g. Miller 1997; Blim 2000). However, if the grounds for wearing denim are always specific to that region or population, then how can anthropology contribute to the other factor that needs explaining; that is, the global ubiquity? In this paper we attempt to overcome this dualism, and produce a genuine dialectic that starts from the evident situation that people are wearing jeans simultaneously for global and local reasons. In order to occupy even the starting gates, it is necessary to take denim to be a serious candidate for such an ambitious transformation, and the problem that we face is the problem of the blindingly obvious. The blindingly obvious Anthropology, which grew up in cousinhood with archaeology, takes to the analysis of the minutiae of practice in a manner akin to that of an excavation. Anthropologists often discern within activities and customs either a rule like behaviour or at least a sign of a larger order which acts as explanatory context. There is also a delight in exposing unexpected or unnoticed behaviours excavated through painstaking long-term fieldwork. However, the term ‘blindingly obvious’ represents an apposite challenge to such an anthropology; it implicates another source of anthropological knowledge that is anything but hidden. The phrase suggests that some things are so evident, so ubiquitous and taken for granted that they are indeed blinding. That in taking them for granted we find it more difficult to take them seriously or as important evidence for the nature of what we have uncovered. A recent example would be Wilk's (2006) study of the quite extraordinary global trade in bottled water. The ubiquity of blue denim as a global clothing is precisely such a blindingly obvious presence in the world. No-one today is going to be surprised by the fact that shamans or hunters wear blue jeans. Anthropologists have bored themselves silly with such anecdotes for the past 30 years. Furthermore, denim seems to rule not just in breadth but in depth. In heartlands such as the United States, the average American woman owns 8.3 pairs of jeans (Cotton Incorporated 2005) and over half of the adults in the UK ‘usually’ wear jeans (Mintel Market Research 2005). So this paper will not waste time demonstrating the ubiquity of denim. These figures are all that we need to make clear our starting point. The problem is that this is blindingly obvious. What precisely we are blinded to is simply the question: why denim? The aim is to imagine a specifically anthropological answer to this question. At present it is history rather than anthropology that is likely to be most people's first port of call. Yet even if we can read a narrative that documents step by step the journey from a world prior to denim to a denim-saturated world, a historical narrative is a story, a sequence of events, but not necessarily an explanation of these events. The prehistory of this narrative is already well recorded, thanks largely to Balfour-Paul (1998) tracing the roots of blue jeans in indigo. Ironically, the rise of denim has mainly preserved the look of indigo through artificial dye over more or less the same period that saw the decline of the once global use of indigo itself as dominant because it is one of the least fugitive of natural dyes. Whilst there exists no comprehensive scholarly history of denim, there are multiple popular histories of denim and blue jeans (e.g. Finlayson 1990), which range from discussions of blue jeans and iconography (Marsh and Trynka 2002) to the specific brand history of Levi-Strauss (Downey 1996). The most useful of these popular histories is James Sullivan's (2006)Jeans: a cultural history of an American icon, which outlines both the history of the singular form of blue jeans and also the history of its form as fashion. First, the book sketches out the story of indigo and of denim fabric, situated in the histories of slavery and the American Gold Rush. Sullivan outlines the formation of a standard indigo warp and white weft, twill fabric and the critical intervention of Levi-Strauss in the 1870s through the patenting of the rivet to prevent tearing, which creates the core style of denim jeans. The presence of these rivets, and the densely wound fibres that constitute the denim fabric, mean this hardy material clothed the working population that built the United States through agriculture and industry. These work-wear overalls mutated to become an icon of the struggle by the next generation born of that working population, which wished to assert itself against a suffocating parental and national ideology of normative order. This was exemplified in the Marlon Brando of The Wild Bunch and the James Dean of Rebel Without a Cause. Alongside this dominant masculinised history is a lesser trajectory associated with women in general, and women such as Marilyn Monroe in particular. From there we can trace its presence through the influence of US popular culture to the rest of the world, for example, how the fall of the Berlin wall appeared on our TV screens as if it was being toppled by a sea of blue jeans. Sullivan's narrative gives us a satisfactory sequence of significant moments and critical actors and actresses that are precisely a cultural history of an American icon. In turn, Americanisation was part of what inspired people, or even at times prevented people from appropriating blue jeans as a global form (Miller 1990). But this wider context immediately raises more complex issues of the relationship between local trajectories. So while Sullivan recognises that the 1960s was a major period of re-commitment to blue jeans, a recent study by Hammer (2007) shows that within a socialist setting such as Hungary this has a quite specific political inflection which utilised the way in which clothing could ‘speak’ for what otherwise might be politically unacceptable aspirations of the time. Though in practice this evolved as much through parent–child conflicts, just as it had in the 1960s generation within capitalist societies. Sullivan also provides us with the second aspect of the narrative, the agency of capitalism embodied in the designers, marketing agents and interests of firms. The development of blue jeans is as firmly attached to brands as the rivets of the pockets that make Levi-Strauss the sire of blue denim. Subsequent firms established their own resonance with feelings of authenticity and American-ness. Lee and Wrangler attach themselves to the romance of the cowboy manifested by John Wayne. Otherwise, a British label, Lee Cooper, is re-vitalised by the allure of London's Carnaby Street in the 1960s. What then follows in the 1980s is the history of designer jeans and the race as to who can create the first $100 and then $200 dollar jeans. Today we can cross a few metres of a shop such as Macy's and see blue jeans leap from $30 to $230 with little instantly discernable difference in texture and style. Anthropologists may be somewhat bemused to find the extra couple of hundred dollars come with labels such as ‘Citizens of Humanity’ or ‘7 for all Mankind’, or more prosaically Joe or James. Designer jeans might delude us into thinking that some capitalist designer engineered not only the jeans but a gullible jeans-wearing population. But most jeans are not designer jeans. After reading such accounts as Sullivan we may feel that we have cut through the blindness of the blindingly obvious, and that we now have tales to tell about how and why, when and for whom. In the least, we have a story of how blue jeans came to conquer not just the US, but the world. The historical narrative of blue jeans and ‘Americana’ could easily be appropriated by the meta-sociology often used in cultural studies. The story can become an example of Americanisation, or ‘the signifier’ or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000). Denim seems to fit well onto theorists of late capitalism, becoming merely pretty obvious rather than blindingly obvious. However, there is an equally evident anthropological response: the negation of this general explanation through ethnographic specificity. We now provide two such examples, since it is only in the relationship between these different kinds of account, that of universalism and relativism, that we might come to envisage another possibility, around which we could unite, as under a manifesto. The ethnography of denim: two versions Our two case studies derive from ethnographies of jeans as a fashion item in Brazil and as everyday apparel in England. Sullivan may account for the construction of an American icon, but anthropology asks for the cultural relativism implicit in accounting also for a South African, Slovakian or Argentinean icon. Ethnography suggests narratives other than that of Americanisation that account for each regionally situated relationship to denim. Brazilian jeans The possibility that some regions and populations may have a very specific relationship to denim is most persuasive when that region has given rise to a particular variant of denim. This is the case in Brazil. In many countries the denim cognoscenti would recognise a specific genre called Brazilian jeans. Fortunately, thanks to extensive research by a Brazilian anthropologist, Mylene Mizrahi, the history and consequences of this specific form is now well established. In brief, Brazilian jeans are a response to the degree of emphasis within Brazil on the female buttocks that seems to be generally acknowledged by Brazilians as characteristic of the region. In order to accentuate this feature, manufacturers devised a material that looks from a distance like denim, as it is inevitably within the general blue to indigo spectrum of conventional denim, but in terms of the material is actually quite different from conventional denim. Although the constituents of the material as pure cotton with a small elastane component of under 5% is the same as much contemporary conventional denim, the material seems to be spun more like a jersey material rather than produced through more conventional weave, and the elastane content creates stretch in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The material is also very thin. As a result, the jeans can be purchased in small sizes and effectively stretched over the body. They then accentuate the shape of the body almost in the manner of a body stocking. In Brazil they are often described as a ‘bra for the bumbum’, that it is actually giving lift to the buttocks, although in practice it is more that it holds and reveals rather than lifts. As Mizrahi (in preparation) shows, this material is first made popular by a firm called Gang, with which it is still most commonly associated in Brazil. Although Gang originally sold its products to a largely nouveau riche market, these jeans came to particular prominence following their appropriation for use at Funk balls, a form of popular culture associated with the dance and music of the favela slums of Rio. The meaning of ‘Brazilian jeans’ develops both through its materiality and associations. The jeans, along with the tops and shirts that accompany them, are extremely elastic, adhering to the body and enhancing the rounded female form, especially legs and buttocks, and give comfort to the dancers, who accomplish extreme movements with their legs and hips, almost touching the dance floor (Mizrahi 2007). The jeans are integral to an overall ‘Funk wardrobe’, where the physical quality of the garments and their relation of opposition to male clothing play a central role in the prevailing atmosphere of seduction at these Funk balls. In her Master's thesis, Mizrahi (2006) situates the use of the stretch denim within the wider context of women's Funk outfit, observing their extensive preparations and exchanges of clothes. Creating the right impact means employing this ‘calça da gang’, that is various versions of stretch jeans, with appliqués and embroidery and colours, to create a more complex ambiguity of sensuality and chastity than the alternative short skirts. These Brazilian jeans in a wide range of cuts and embellishments were very much in evidence in 2006. The next stage develops when Brazilian jeans become associated with the high-value middle-class firms who are appropriating the transgressive popularity of Funk but in such a manner as to distance themselves from many of the attributes of Funk. The story seems to provide a clear analogy with the US trajectory, which passes through a moment of transgressive rebellion giving it the quality that is normally termed ‘edgy’ by the expensive designers who subsequently appropriate it for their own purposes. The trajectory in Brazil passes through a specific context of class and race associations that have parallels with, but are also distinct from, those identified by Sullivan for the US. They also add particular qualities in relation to sensuality and sexuality, such that Brazilian jeans now take their own place as an international genre that can now be exported to Paris or California as a material commoditisation of Brazilian sensuality and sexuality more generally. Most Brazilians, however, do not wear ‘Brazilian jeans’, which form a relatively small proportion of the actual blue denim jeans sold at the markets in Rio and elsewhere. So this kind of anthropological investigation is complementary to another which focuses upon the ubiquitous and the ordinary wearing of jeans rather than its place within the mutual exploitation of the fashion industry and the semiotics of class or sex. As an instance of this other kind of anthropology, we briefly present some of the findings of Woodward's ethnography of women selecting their clothes while dressing in the morning in London and Nottingham. Security in ubiquity Woodward accepted the rather daunting challenge of how to construct something analogous to traditional ethnography in the study of the clothing of a contemporary metropolis such as London. For this, she studied the wardrobe of clothing, both in its entirety as a collection and in its active form, by observing the daily act of getting dressed (Woodward 2005, 2007). She spent time in women's bedrooms watching how they chose what to wear. This proved essential, because it transpired that it was more through seeing what women rejected than what they finally wore that revealed the contradictions and ambivalences which are core to women's clothing choices. Irrespective of women's social positioning or background, the pivotal dynamic which underpins how women choose what to wear is between clothing that is ‘easy’ and ‘safe’, and clothing that allows women to transform themselves. Woodward discussed this in terms of habitual clothing, i.e. those items of clothing that women know how to wear through wearing them all of the time. These contrast with non-habitual clothing, i.e. those items that involve a self-conscious engagement with women's image as they use clothing to interrogate ‘could this be me?’ On a daily basis, women rely on their habitual clothing. Whilst either for a special occasion or when trying to distance themselves from the sense that they are becoming boring, or because of the demands of work or a party, they will attempt to create new combinations from non-habitual clothing. For most women, their ‘active wardrobe’, that is items that women consider wearing on any regular basis, comprises less than 38% of the clothing they own. The remaining clothing that hangs in the wardrobe includes the creative possibilities of who women could be, and have been in the past. On any actual occasion of choosing what to wear, more often than not, women experience these other possibilities and apparent choices as a constraint. Therefore this relationship between habitual and non-habitual clothing rests upon the tension between anxiety and possibility, creativity and constraint. It is this tension at the core of women's clothing choices that in turn sheds light on the role that denim occupies in the wardrobe. The finding that all women owned and regularly wore jeans would hardly seem like a ‘finding’ at all. However, what an ethnography of getting dressed shows is how denim jeans have become absolutely pivotal in how women make clothing choices: women wear jeans so often because they both resolve and encapsulate this core dynamic between anxiety and possibility. This can be illustrated by two examples from the ethnography. The first case, Theresa, is a woman who orders her clothing in order to minimise the chances of having any wardrobe dilemmas. This ordering extends to her jeans, which, as something she wears almost every day, she has organised with the aim of ensuring that she has the right pair of jeans for any occasion. This includes six pairs of jeans that she wears regularly; spending most of the day doing household chores alone, or in the presence of her two small children. Her choice of denim for regular day wear is governed by the hardiness of the fabric, meaning they will not be ruined by gardening or playing with the children. One pair worn regularly is now characteristic of such old worn jeans. The fabric has abraded through wearing and washing, and as the white cotton fibres become visible, the jeans soften in touch and in appearance. Not only are these old jeans one of her most comfortable items of clothing, but this comfort is simultaneously physical, as the denim fabric softens, and personal, as this process of aging and softening is experienced alongside changes in the wearer's body. While her most regular day jeans are unadorned pale blue, suffering a fit of boredom, she recently purchased three new ‘fun’ pairs. They are each in a similar style: low waisted, resting on the hipbone, and slightly boot cut. They include 3% elastane fibres, which makes them slightly stretchy. Unlike the worn, standard jeans, these new jeans are embroidered, covered in glitter, or in one case bleached down the centre and then dyed pink. These are then still clearly blue jeans, but equally clearly differentiated. Jeans are thereby not only a staple of her practical day wardrobe, hardy, easy to wash and ‘go’ with everything, but they are also a key item of ‘going out’ clothing, where they can become ‘special’ and different. Every evening when her husband returns home from work, Theresa dresses for dinner; often by changing from her ‘day’ jeans into her ‘evening’ jeans. In common with almost all of the other women that Woodward worked with, the result is a pattern where the wearer feels sufficiently personalised through the ‘fun’ and ‘fashion’ details on her evening jeans while remaining within the relatively safe and easy category of blue denim itself. Theresa's strategy seems to allow her to avoid many unwanted wardrobe crises. For other women, denim jeans emerge more as the sole solution to such crises. Louise has ten pairs of jeans, and she wears jeans almost daily. However, unlike Theresa, they are not as clearly divided into domains, occasions and functions, but more subtly into the jeans which make her bottom look perter, jeans which can be worn with heels and jeans which flatten her stomach. As with many other women, Louise values and orders her jeans into the body that they give her. On one occasion, outlined in Woodward (2007), Louise is invited to a party of friends she has not seen for a long time. These friends all have high-powered, well-paid jobs. Louise is unemployed and unable to afford much by way of new clothes. Intimidated by the invitation, a wardrobe of clothing she normally feels comfortable with now feels alien to her, as the usually unselfconscious habitual clothing now has the spotlight cast on it. She panics as even her trusty pairs of jeans now appear boring to her, dreary and uninteresting. In that moment it becomes inconceivable that these items of clothing could ever have been so reliable. She imagines the fashionable, expensive clothing that her friends will be attired in, relegating her own clothing to drab anonymity. On this occasion ‘safe’ and ‘easy’ will not do. She despondently tries on everything, toying with the idea of wearing one of her mini-skirts, but she has neither the confidence nor the inclination to wear them. Despite her impoverished state, in the end she feels there is no option but to buy something new, on credit. Yet notwithstanding the ten pairs of jeans already in her wardrobe, when confronted by the apparently endless choice within myriad high street stores, Louise ends up buying yet another pair of jeans. Albeit in a slightly different style: cropped, low-slung and with buckles at the side. In buying and wearing these jeans to the party, she feels comfortable, yet at the same time sufficiently interesting and different, thanks again to the extra detail. In both these examples jeans transcend the fundamental divisions of the domestic wardrobe. They are not just the habitual, un-thought out items of clothing; they also allow women to be ‘noticed’. They internally resolve the tensions between conformity and individuality that have been central to theories of fashion since Simmel (1957). As Nedelmann (1990: 223) suggests, one definition of fashion as experienced is the ‘exchange of reciprocal ambivalence’. Denim jeans are not only the most generic item of clothing; they are at the same time the item women state they felt the most comfortable in, that women feel is most ‘me’. Jeans allow women to comment upon, exemplify and critique this conformist self. Through this ethnography we can start to analyse the relationship between this phenomenon at the micro level of individuals and the macro level of a global response. Distressing – reconciling global and local responses Woodward's findings relate closely to a suggestion by Clarke and Miller (2002) that we re-think our starting point for a theory of fashion. That is, if, as Woodward shows, most people's primary point of reference is not to the fashion industry but to their personal state of anxiety about what to wear, then a theory of fashion should also not start from the fashion industry, but from a study of this anxiety. Woodward's larger ethnography suggests that we can specify the local genres of anxiety, and their specific reference points