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.