The Theory Schmucks

[This piece was originally given as a symposium on April 19, 2006]

By now, the blue jean should be tired cliché—overdone, co-opted by knock-offs, made into caricature. The personality that can be packed into a pair of jeans has made denim the uniform of casual. Blue jeans have joined America’s background noise: the word ‘jeans’ can even substitute for ‘pants’. It is their omnipresence that makes them interesting. Like every single thing we wear, jeans encode messages. They are so common, though, that we often ‘read’ them unself-consciously.

Our clothes talk to the world around us. With what we wear, we announce our allegiances, our moods, even our body image issues. When Umberto Eco says he is ‘speaking through’ his clothes,¹ he (of course) does not mean that he replaces verbal language with the discourse of dress. He’s drawing attention to the idea that other people see what we’re wearing as part of us, no matter how much we try to play down the importance.

Most people, most of the time, are not consciously aware of the messages their clothing sends. I don’t mean, necessarily, that your clothes are giving everybody the wrong impression. They might be though. I’m looking at you, Kristen Bell at any premier or show ever.

My point is that clothing is largely an aesthetic choice. It’s mostly gut instinct that puts pieces together. Usually, our instinctive sense of style works just fine. Sure, it’s handy to know that short people look best in slim fits and high waist-lines, or that dark washes dress up better. Much more important, though, is unself-conscious fashion subtlety. Style can be learned, and fashion, produced in a factory. It’s clothing’s visceral language that is most intriguing.

See, there’s a dirty little secret the fashion industry buries behind big-name branding and titles like “fashion forward” or “business casual”: what you mean by your clothes is not always what other people see. As semiotics teaches,² we never get one-to-one information transfer when we try to communicate. Any sign—anything passed among us that conveys meaning—includes both the means of conveyance (the signifier) and the message we mean to send (the signified). And in any exchange, there are (at least) two signifieds: the meaning the sender intends and the meaning the listener receives. Art historian and design theorist Malcolm Barnard says,

It could be claimed that, even if the intention of the designer or the wearer does not reach the receiver, that the receiver will always manage to construct some meaning for the garment or outfit. It does not seem to be the case that anyone ever thinks that someone else is wearing something meaningless.³

The lesson here: the listeners we say something to, and how we say it, matter as much as what we say.

Fashion changes every season and has innumerable unspoken rules. For that reason, any one piece of clothing is continually resignified: its meaning is re-defined. Some easy examples: what says “sexy” to one person may scream “slut” to another. In fact, what says “sexy” to a person when clubbing may, in a workplace, say “immature” or “attention-hog.” We all know about dressing to a situation, but give this some thought—just as the same piece of clothing sends different messages based on your environment, so too it sends different messages when it enters others’ environments: mental, social, and economic. It seems obvious not to wear enormous, baggy skating jeans to a funeral. But the propriety of high-fashion, ultra-distressed jeans on casual Friday? That’s not so cut and dried. It pays to know whom you’re talking to before you make a statement—whether with clothes or with words.

Communicating with clothes requires playing the tension between personal identity and group affiliation. Your clothes create the first impression you make. Before anyone gets to know the persona you’ve crafted through a lifetime of socializing, people see you and what you’re wearing. The tension comes from needing both to stand out—you want to show onlookers a persona worth getting to know—and simultaneously to signal, “I know what’s socially acceptable.” As Barnard says, “it is the social interacting, by means of the clothing, that constitutes [. . .] a member of the group.”⁴ It stands to reason that deviation from the norm would be what identifies an individual. But: even if the look you’re building is utter rebellion, à la 1960s British punk, you must show onlookers that you know what rules you’re breaking. Otherwise, you seem simply foolish. So the challenge is finding an identifiable archetype and making it unique. The distinction can come from resistance or alteration, but somehow the look has to be individualized.

How do jeans fit in? As cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard tells us, ‘fashion is always retro’: any piece is a ‘total recycling’ of what has come before it.⁵ To understand how jeans function today, then, we need a look at contemporary jeans’ origin and development. The whole history of denim, especially in America, documents the double agenda I mentioned earlier: the desire to stand out and, simultaneously, fit in.

Jeans began as—and for a long time, remained—suitable only for the working class. As fashion for women, Vogue began running pictures of models in jeans in the mid-30′s. It took the likes of James Dean to popularize the attachment of youthful rebellion to blue jeans. Watching “Rebel Without a Cause,” the youth of the Fifties recognized a godsend. One pair of pants could be resilient, identify one as both ‘tough’ and ‘cool’, and (especially) set one apart from the generation before.

The Sixties and Seventies hiked the blue jean’s popularity. Jeans were still part of counter-culture—but what a counterculture!
Hippie flower children, dispossessed protesters, militant malcontents: they all put on jeans, motivated in largely the same way as young rebels of the Fifties. Jeans both looked good and lasted. They were resilient, and that mattered to a person trying both to dress well and not to feed money into the capitalist war machine. Jeans had become tied to youth culture—a single piece of clothing to live your life in.

In the mid-Eighties, high-fashion got hold of jeans—and began the project known as “distressing.” The distressing process scuffs, tears, grinds, or wears out denim before it ever hits the store. The fashion world puts incredible stock in the intentionality of design: the self-conscious choices made in creating clothes. Not only are new jeans stiff and, often, too blue. They also make their wearers look uncomprehending. Jeans that are non-faded, non-worn, run counter to jeans’ very idea: an everyday pant that will hold up to torture. Pristine jeans look more like weird blue trousers than like James Dean’s bad-ass uniform. But jeans that are old and worn are often saggy, torn in inappropriate places, or too thin to look right. There’s a narrow pass between too-new and too-worn, and every pair of jeans needs to go through it—or did, till the likes of Abercrombie and Fitch got hold of the idea.

Distressing allows wearers to show both that they’re willing to be affected by the world around them—their jeans show fading, scratches, and scarring—and that they self-consciously choose to look so. Instead of saying, “I am subject to the whims of the world around me,” those who purchase distressed denim say, “I want the world to see me living in it, not against it.” Distressed jeans often stitch holes and rips invisibly at the edges: holes, then, don’t enlarge into a hindrance. Distressing lets its wearers say, and go on saying, that they control their appearance. They have worldly experience, but find it manageable. They’re not falling apart.

This suggestion of control makes interesting rhetoric in America’s current “Culture of Fear.” Daily, we confront colored alerts. Warnings tell us we’re in dire peril, but not—never—what to do about it. Duct tape and plastic wrap? Thanks greatest-American-engineering minds! In the aftermath of September 11, deluged with news of domestic surveillance, Americans are pressed by our government to entrust our security to external forces. Creating the Department of Homeland Security, passing (and renewing) the Patriot Act: such phenomena help naturalize the notion of a government protection bubble. If the enemy might be anywhere—if any forgotten briefcase or bag might mean doomsday—then we need both government and military to protect us from our very lives. This paranoid atmosphere heightens what sociologist Kim Sawchuck calls “a fabric of intertextuality:”⁶ that is, a system that produces, reads, and interacts with symbols. The culture of fear in which we live informs our every interaction—including the wearing of our jeans.

Perhaps the culture of fear helps explains the proliferation of distressed jeans. Certainly, it doesn’t explain their creation: they’ve been around since the Eighties.

Today, though—in the face of apparent continual threat—there is obvious appeal in clothing that communicates perseverance. We have been told that we need to be protected. So a piece of clothing that says, “Do your worst, I can take it,” suggests strength without suggesting a domination. Sort of a sartorial “America! Fuck yeah!“

It is reassuring to wear our battle scars. We have been taught that our sense of self exists most importantly within us. Among all the aspects of identity, interiority is most privileged. As we seem to lose control over our own survival, it becomes a matter of pride and service-to-self to say to the world, “I can take care of myself.”

That opportunity leads to the interesting notion of ‘destroyed’ jeans.

Here, we see intense fraying, bleaching, and discoloration of the jean. Destroyed jeans—though logically an extension of distressed—could have come into fashion only after the milder form of fabric abuse had paved their way. Destroyed jeans let the wearer say that the world can affect their bodies but not their individuality. Despite abuse from the environment, the self remains intact.

Destroyed jeans are a more poignant form of the rhetorical game played by distressing. The idea of jeans affected by their environment is intensified: jeans are functionally changed by their environment. Enormous holes, fraying that steadily worsens as one walks on it, chemical alteration of the denim (which weakens it and thins it out): these effects are more extravagant than scuffs and small tears. At their most obvious job (not their only one), destroyed jeans perform worse: they protect the legs less from the environment. This fact helps extend my hypothesis about jeans’ response to the culture of fear. Remember: consumers are buying these jeans when, apparently, they’re already broken.

Wearing a pair of destroyed jeans shows that one would rather be radically changed by external forces—and keep going—than remain safe in the boxes they’re told to occupy. When we show ourselves thoroughly at the mercy of external forces—allowing the environment and other people to help shape the face we show—we problematize the notion of identity. Identity predicated on self-contained, self-possessed, self- directing independence simply does not allow for other people or things to have a say in who we are. Destroyed jeans appeal to that part of us that resists governmental and cultural attempts to encapsulate us, “for our own protection,” in our own little cell. Destroyed jeans reject an identity of secure singularity. They affirm, by contrast, an identity that is interactive.

As I’ve noted, the tension between individual and group identity is key to the fashion game—you must fit in enough to be recognized, but stand out enough to be distinctive. Distressed and destroyed jeans allow wearers both to individualize themselves—with, say, a unique tear, bleach, or grinding pattern—and to identify themselves with any number of groups. Simply wearing jeans allies the wearer with the history I’ve outlined, and subcultural subtleties—hip hop’s baggy Sean-Pauls, indy’s tight straight-legged Levis —define further allegiances. Jeans allow their wearers, with a single garment, both to group and to individualize themselves.

I don’t mean, of course, that all these choices are made intentionally by everyone who wears jeans. I don’t imagine the country’s fourteen-year-olds search the clothing racks for the just the right way to assert their identity politics. Cultural appeal does not rely on conscious thought. We may choose what we wear because “it just looks good.” But the reasons for aesthetic appeal are my concern: as the countercultures of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies chose blue jeans and/or bell bottoms, our generation chooses distressing.

Political statements get distilled into an essence. Especially in popular fashion—a discourse based entirely on mimicry and alteration—the driving force comes from those who wear the clothes, not those who design and present them. High fashion can declare any number of trends: Vogue can say pink is the new black any number of times. But if no one buys the clothes—or more importantly, no one wears them—the message never gets heard. British punks of the 1960s did not intend to set a fashion curve: their style of dress simply became synonymous with their protest of classism and social norms. Trends quickly leave the control of those who start them: think, for example, of the punk scene in America. Teenagers from wealthy suburban families are as likely to buy their studded leather jackets and torn, stained T-shirts from Hot Topic as they are to find them in the trash, make them themselves, or buy them at a second-hand store. The actual message has changed completely: American punks, adopting the fashions of British forerunners, don’t see “punk” as rebellion against classism. They see it merely as rebellion.

[I'm sure we'll tackle the Culture Industry in a later post]

Here, authenticity is almost irrelevant. Onlookers may regard American punks as posers: they aren’t following the original message. But if they portray what they want to, does it matter? They are not necessarily claiming to be heirs to the Sex Pistols. They’re simply adopting a discourse that is useful to their purpose. The same goes for distressing and destroying. No, jeans that are already destroyed when you buy them do not actually indicate environmental abuse: they don’t have to. Distressed and destroyed jeans are communicative choices. Both get a lot of flack: people are buying jeans that are worn out before they leave the store. But then again, how many people dye all their own clothing? It is no more natural for cotton to be blue than strategically ripped.

No doubt, cultural context informs the choice of one garment over another. But it would be foolish to believe that aesthetic choice is always self-consciously political. Remember: what you mean is not always what others hear. Often, you say things you never intended. Fashion is one way we get to talk back to and change the popular discourse: our trends (sartorial or otherwise) reflect our lives, our concerns, and our reality. Being conscious of the messages we’re sending lets us better say what we mean, and better understand what we’re being told.

End Notes
1. Eco 59.
2. See, for example, the writing of Charles Sanders Peirce—or Teresa de Lauretis’s summary of his semiotic insight (de Lauretis 38–42).
3. Barnard 29.
4. Barnard 30.
5. Baudrillard 88.
6. Sawchuk 65.

Bibliography and Citations

Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996.

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London, England: Sage, 1993.

Blankensop, Mia. “Sleeping Beauty and the Sword of God: The Culture of Fear in Contemporary America.” Student Symposium. Beloit College, Beloit, WI. 14 Apr. 2004.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender.” In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 31–50.

Eco, Umberto. “Social Life as a Sign System.” In Structuralism. Ed. D. Robey. Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1973.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914). Collected Papers. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1931–1958.

Rebel without a Cause. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Perf. James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo. Warner, 1955.

Sawchuk, Kim. “A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements.” In Body Invaders: Sexuality and the Post-Modern Condition. Ed. A. Kroker and M. Kroker. London, Eng.: Macmillan, 1988.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Fashion Studies, Full Papers, Semiotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.