Post modern pair: what jeans mean is now more important than what they are. McKenzie Wark explains

New Internationalist, June, 1998 by McKenzie Wark

IT'S strange how an idea as contradictory as `designer jeans' comes, after a while, to seem quite normal. Jeans are a practical garment that made their way into the quite impractical world of the post-war fashion system. Right alongside Tiffanys and other designer brands on New York's classy Fifth Avenue sits an outlet for Levi's jeans. In this paradox lies one of the most striking changes in the shape of the fashion industry.

Jeans are a garment that puts together the ingenuity and resources available in the US at the time of the civil war. This very large-scale conflict was the incentive for the industrialization of a good many work processes. The first example of what we would now recognize as mass-production techniques was for civil-war firearms. The need for military uniforms led to similar techniques being used for clothing, and to a system of standard sizes that is still with us today.

Fashion and clothing were - and to some extent still are - a modern, industrialized system with two distinctive rhythms of production and consumption. Whatever people wear until it wears out is clothing. Whatever people wear until a new style comes along is fashion. Jeans were once clothing rather than a fashion garment, until something happened to them that was part of a whole shift in the workings of the fashion system. Where a style would usually pass down the fashion system, jeans were one garment style that moved up.

Think of a classic image from the US of the 1950s in which jeans figure. James Dean or Marilyn Monroe are likely to come to mind. Actually, these Hollywood stars were not the first to borrow this lowly garment and use it as a sign of style rather than as a practical garment. The fashion career of jeans probably starts with subcultures on the fringes of American society such as the `rough trade' side of male homosexual life and the demobilized wartime pilots who took up the motorcycle as recreation.

In the 1960s, jeans proliferated as a garment that could appear to its wearer to be a statement against the whole hierarchy of fashion, while in the end fitting quite well into a new kind of fashion order.

Easy Rider was a low-budget film, made on the fringes of the Hollywood system, and it indicated that much the same thing was happening to the movie industry as to the fashion industry. The orderly mass production of cultural artefacts and signs gave way to a much less stable pattern of culture industries without as definite a hierarchy of price and quality. An idea or an image could come out of nowhere and pass into mass popularity.

The cut and colour of denim jeans started to vary seasonally, just like a fashion garment. Here is the beginning of the paradox of the `postmodern' fashion system. Jeans are functional and cheap to assemble. Yet, in spite of their basic cuts and exposed seams, they can support an elaborate range of meanings.

With `modern' fashions, the material quality of the garment and its ability to signify fashion and stylishness went together. With `postmodern' fashion there need be no such connection. What the garment signifies might be quite at odds with its material qualities - as it is in the archetypal case of the blue jean. Much the same garment can support quite a wide variety of meanings with a few minor variations in its appearance.

The 1960s saw a great proliferation of pop culture, as incomes rose throughout the developed world and more and more people went looking for something on which to spend their disposable income. This was both a good time and a bad time for mass manufacturers of a clothing item like blue jeans. Rising incomes meant more purchasing power and a bigger market, but it also meant rising costs. While the production of the fabric lends itself to automation and to economies of scale, some parts of the cutting and assembling of garments do not.

To make matters worse, the 1960s also saw an explosion of small-scale manufacturers and retailers who took advantage of the vast expansion of pop culture to market a bewildering array of ever-changing styles. Big manufacturers often found it hard to keep up. The aura of style created around the blue jean by Hollywood and Western pop culture did not end at the borders of the US. The names Levi Strauss and Wrangler found their way onto the behinds of people living far from the badlands of American life from which the garments allegedly arose.

The proliferation of pop culture, with its unpredictable style shifts, its valuing of cheap materials, its multiple-entry points for new expressions of style, was a difficult time for the mass manufacturers. Such a basic garment was easily copied, even counterfeited, in the developing world. Moving production there might have lowered costs, but it also created an industry that could quickly duplicate such a basic commodity.

One response was to absorb jeans fully into the bottom end of the fashion system, with annual variations in styles, with decorative stitching, choice of colour, distinctive ranges for men and women, extremes of cut such as the flare and even the zipper on the back - a shortlived innovation of the 1970s. The point of these changes was the effort by the big manufacturers to stay one jump ahead of imitators. Ironically, just as big firms like Levi Strauss benefited from the circulation of images, so their imitators benefited from the advertising campaigns, which promoted the idea of the garment as much as any particular brand. Hence the continual efforts to distinguish products made by the leading brands.