Forever in Blue Jeans

As I write this I am wearing blue jeans. And there’s a good chance that as you read this, you’re wearing blue jeans too. But why are they so popular? In this story from Vestoj, anthropologist Professor Daniel Miller turns his attention to a ubiquitous item of clothing, to see what we’re saying (or not saying) when we reach for that favourite old pair of jeans.

On occasion, I’ve stood on street corners in major cities around the world and noted that more than half the people who passed by me were wearing blue denim. This, to me, is a prime example of the extraordinary nature of the entirely ordinary.

As an anthropologist, my aim is to find things that are so completely ordinary that we take them for granted and consider them ‘natural’. It’s why I love the expression ‘blindingly obvious’: something so in front of your face that you just don’t see it. We use anthropology to show that other societies actually do things very differently – who they call family, what they find funny, and how they use their retirement. If things are different, then they’re not natural and therefore need explaining. In short, we explain the ordinary in the context of the extraordinary.

My own work has focused mainly on material culture studies: highlighting the extraordinary in the way we shop, decorate our homes, and think about cars. So observing people of all types and in all climates wear jeans was, as I’m sure you can imagine, irresistible.

My at first entirely unscientific experiment eventually led to a joint project with Sophie Woodward, who had just finished her PhD in anthropology under my supervision. We connected with other people around the world who were studying denim to create the book Global Denim. Following this, we carried out our own ethnography on the topic in London, which produced the book Blue Jeans. We based our joint ethnography in some completely nondescript streets in North West London that we had absolutely no reason whatsoever to choose – which is usually how I decide who to study. In this case, the population turned out to have a relatively high proportion of families who had originally migrated from South Asia, and it overall might be characterised as lower-middle or upper-working class.

One explanation why we wear blue denim today is that we are sold to wear it by those who will profit from our behaviour. But even though there are companies that make good money out of blue denim, this is not always the case. In talking to people in the fashion industry – the Hugo Boss headquarters was a good source here – we mostly found that people in the profession were frustrated by denim. They wanted clothes that would go out of fashion so they could produce new fashion. The people we mainly worked with saw no reason to ever change from the type of blue jeans they routinely wore. They might at best have one pair of more fashionable jeans for special occasions but mostly preferred the cheap, non-branded version. When we showed them pieces from other brands, they couldn’t tell the brands since they would buy their jeans cheaply – from the supermarkets. And, as it turns out, the basic form of faux-indigo cotton with double stitching and rivets are essentially identical in markets from Australia to Alaska, South Africa to Norway.

The clothing industry would naturally prefer us to dispense with clothing as soon as it no longer looks fresh and new. Blue jeans are the worst. We wear them more than anything else, and we keep them in our cupboards longer than anything else. We don’t throw them away when they get dirty or worn; in fact, many think they only get better with time. People do make money from selling blue jeans – be it Louis Vuitton, Levi’s, and Gap or Walmart and Primark. But it’s the latter two where the people we spoke to typically buy their jeans. Still, we cannot say that commerce is the cause of denim’s prevalence, since firms would arguably make a whole lot more money if no one wore it. It’s almost as though blue jeans have been thumbing their nose at fashion for a hundred years and more.

The job of the academic is to interpret evidence, and when one comes across something rather peculiar, it helps to look out for other strange features. This way, we put together the different observations to see how they make a picture. The more we examined denim, the stranger it appeared to be. Normally, when we go into a clothing shop, we look for items that are pristine. A mere stain or fault would give us grounds for requesting a reduction in price. We might recoil in horror to see a garment that had been speckled with bleach, torn at the knee, stained with rust, frayed and ripped – except if the item in question is blue jeans. I’m old enough to remember when this started. In my teenage years, I hitchhiked around free rock concerts as a hippie in flowered shirts and blue denim flares with so little attention to washing and changing that they did indeed fray themselves to death. Commerce decided to copy this process of abrasion through stone-washing, to which were later added such wonderful technologies as moon wash, sandblasting, monkey wash, whiskering, ozone fading and acid wash.

If this was not strange enough, we can add a third observation: that a piece of clothing that defies everything we know about fashion and is subject to the most appalling treatment by both us and commerce has nevertheless also become by far the most global and ubiquitous garment choice. It has become simultaneously the most strange and the least strange of garments. It was perhaps fortunate that both Sophie and I came to this detective work ready with certain qualifications that would turn out to be essential in solving this mystery. I once wrote a paper called ‘The little black dress is the solution. But what is the problem?’ This was used to exemplify something that I had focused on and is summarised by the title of another paper: ‘Fashion and Anxiety.’

Sophie Woodward, meanwhile, had carried out a PhD study which resulted in her book Why Women Wear What They Wear. For her study she had done something which you will be glad to hear I did not: she watched women get dressed in the morning. She noted how often they started with the intention of wearing ‘interesting clothes’. But after looking at themselves in the mirror, they often became nervous about their chosen statement apparel and changed into something less conspicuous. If they were feeling particular anxious that day, they gave to understand that blue jeans was their default clothing. The item they could fall back upon when all else failed. So this would be the fourth rather extraordinary characteristic of blue denim jeans: they are the world’s default wardrobe option.

Over several months, we talked and observed. When talking to people about why they wore blue jeans, the most common reason given was that they were ‘comfortable’. But this begs the question of what people meant by the word ‘comfortable’. It might mean that they felt their jeans fitted well or were soft, but then that would be equally the case with some other cotton trousers. Often it seemed that we could better approach this from the other side. That what was most important was that these garments didn’t make people feel uncomfortable. They helped them feel relaxed. Indeed, the mere fact that they washed denim jeans less often, didn’t have to buy them as often, saw them as generally hard-wearing and all the rest of it made denim nothing to bother about. Yet none of this helps when it comes to an explanation. It is all tautology. Denim jeans are less bother if we wash them less, but we wash them less only because we seem to think we don’t need to wash denim jeans as often. But why do we think that in the first place?

What was more helpful was the way we could observe people using the word ‘comfort’ even more often to how they felt in company when wearing blue denim. Being comfortable referred most often to how a person feels in public or in the presence of others. Many of our participants were quite explicit about the need to look acceptable under the gaze of others and how this was central to their feeling comfortable about themselves. As one of our subjects told us:

“You may have smart trousers but they’re not as comfortable as denim. So you may feel like, ‘I need to be comfortable for that day because I need to get to that state of mind’ and then you just put on the denims. So it’s about a state of mind. I need to have the state of mind to wear that dress or else it’s going to look wrong. I’ll go out and be uncomfortable.”

For younger people especially, the classic scenario where you really don’t want to feel uncomfortable is at a party. We might be told, “I’ve been to places where I wished I was wearing jeans. Like to a club or a bar. You feel more comfortable. You can dance around better. They’re easier and so on.” Or another says, “If I’m going to a house party, I’ll wear jeans… They’re so comfortable. At house parties you never know what’s going to happen and you may have to leave. It’s just to be comfortable and to be ready for anything.”

What matters here is that exactly the same word is being used in two different contexts. One is about physical comfort such as the fit or not feeling bothered to wash one’s jeans. The other is to do with the anxiety about feeling uncomfortable at a party or other social event. Because the same word is used for something that is physical (and in that sense a more literal meaning of comfort), but then also for social situations, the effect is to ‘naturalise’ the argument: to make comments that might otherwise seem quite arbitrary appear natural and obvious. Not being ill at ease in a party is understood as a kind of physical sensation. This explains why jeans can be regarded as default clothing. But as ever it begs the next question: Why do people feel more comfortable in blue jeans?

The final piece of our jigsaw is an equally ubiquitous claim about blue jeans, which is that they ‘go with everything.’ No other garment has quite this capacity for matching with whatever else one is wearing. Yet at first this is just as strange as all the other exceptional qualities of blue jeans. We made sure to ask two questions to as many people as possible. If you had another garment which was indigo blue – satin, for example – could that go with everything? If you have some other denim trousers, say, in bright pink, do those go with everything? The answer was no in both cases. Hence the reason why blue jeans go with everything is not connected with either the fact that they’re blue or the fact that they are made from denim.

That’s probably enough mystery – though I wouldn’t be writing this if we didn’t have a solution for you. We used a very academic term as part of our answer and argued that blue jeans represent the ‘post-semiotic’ in clothing. The term ‘semiotic’ has been used for decades by academics studying clothes. It simply refers to what is signified by that clothing: that a person is male, or cool, or eccentric, or wealthy, or hot. The most common form of clothing analysis is semiotic. Blue jeans were once highly semiotic. Jeans first entered the UK as a beacon of Americanisation. Soon after, they became associated with transgressive or rebellious youth; initially through US icons such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.

But then came the first wave of British jeans – Lee Cooper jeans from the 1960s, which were Britain’s version of youth counterculture, associated with Carnaby Street in London. This association with transgressive youth lasted for quite some time, but during our research the police we talked to saw disobedience in hoodies and tracksuit bottoms, not blue jeans. Jeans styles that might once have been significant, such as extremely baggy or highly distressed styles, no longer were. Similarly, the association with the US is now viewed as entirely historical. No one wears jeans today in order to appear more American or in reference to the US in the way they used to. I also studied blue jeans wearing in India, where the local people thought jeans had been invented in Germany. The same would be true of the colour indigo, which carries historical weight – slavery was often first instituted for indigo plantations, even before sugar and cotton. But only a tiny elite would think in terms of natural indigo today and few wearers of jeans know this history.

What gives blue denim jeans their post-semiotic status is their ubiquity. They’re worn by people of all ages, by the rich and the poor, by the migrant and the indigenous. There are high-end fashion jeans where the looks and brand matter. But most of the people we worked with wore ‘just jeans’. If everyone can equally wear them, then these basic blue jeans lose the capacity for identity politics, because they tell you absolutely nothing at all about the person who is wearing them. They become effectively meaningless; there is nothing in particular that they mean. This is what is meant by the term post-semiotic: something that has lost all capacity for signifying.

It is this quality of the post-semiotic that allows blue jeans to become default clothing. If we’re worried about how we look or what people might think of us because of our clothing choices, then there is only one garment we can choose with confidence where nothing at all is being said about us by virtue of that choice. This is also what allows blue jeans to naturalise the feeling of comfort, or more accurately the avoidance of feeling uncomfortable. Jeans have become a panacea against internal feelings of discomfort, the antacid of fashion. They help us feeling physically comfortable as well at ease in public under the gaze of others. They are the most relaxed, easy-going of garments – seemingly impervious to the pressures of fashion and conformity. Above all, they show how extraordinary the struggle to become merely ordinary is.

Yet there is one final twist to all this. Because there is an obvious downside to everything that has been said. We might not want to feel uncomfortable in public but we also don’t want to allow blue denim to cloud our personality or individuality. Knowing that the same item could be equally worn in Shanghai or Santiago may make us feel even less important within this vast world. Which may be why we ask blue denim to negate the very problem that it seems to cause. The one genre of blue jeans that has not so far been accounted for is distressed jeans. There is simply no other garment that we experience as having the capacity to take on the precise personality and behaviour of its wearer. Wear your jeans long enough, and the creases that form along with the differential fading that makes those creases stand out will be unique to you. With the peculiar logic of the market, that whole history of distressing that hippies like me developed and that was then appropriated by commerce has made jeans simultaneously the least personal and the most personal garment that we have. This is surely no coincidence. It is yet one more way in which jeans can make us feel comfortable beyond the capacity of anything else we wear.

I don’t want to end with the impression that I personally desire a drab homogeneous world of clothing were everyone wears blue jeans. In fact, I hardly ever wear them myself. I get most of my shirts from a shop called Fabindia in India because I find the shirts I can buy in the UK too boring; I usually match them with green or brown denim trousers. But I am of an age and in a position where I can afford to take risks and challenge myself through statement clothing. There are, however, times when I, too, am very thankful to have those blue Marks and Spencer jeans in my wardrobe for when I really can’t decide what to wear.

Vestoj is a research platform that examines people’s relationship to their clothes and fashion’s relationship to identity.

Izzy Bacon is a freelance illustrator and graduate of the University of Edinburgh. Inspired by nature, poetry, folklore and history, she creates playful images defined by expressive line.