This personal relationship to jeans is clearly what commerce has attempted to replicate and then pre-empt through the phenomenon of distressing. Even if this is starting to spread to a few other garments, it clearly developed as a direct response to this unique relationship to denim. But this leads to a clear contradiction. My jeans were personal to my body because of the degree of time they spent on my body. Commercially distressed jeans are an artificial simulation of that process. Yes, you can probably artificially induce some of the softness that comes from constant wear, but not the way the jeans mould themselves to you in particular. Indeed the very sense of the commercial faking of this process seems to mitigate against the sense of the personal.
To understand what is going on, we need to situate the whole phenomenon of distressing within a wider appreciation of the special nature of blue denim jeans – a task which was recently undertaken by myself and Woodward in a paper we called ‘A Manifesto for the Study of Denim’ (Miller and Woodward 2007). This provides the academic argument for a larger Global Denim Project (www.ucl.ac.uk/globaldenim-project). The paper argues for a consideration of distressing in the context or two other unique properties of denim. The first is the sheer global ubiquity. It is equally extraordinary that at a time when there is increasing choice in a post-fordist, competitive market that we should see something increasingly approaching half the world choosing only one particular textile to wear on their lower half, at any given time. This amounts almost to a global refusal of the dictates of fashion and capitalism, since although there are designer jeans, mostly it is a preference for the mundane and non-descript that dominates jean wearing. Secondly there is Woodward’s work on women getting dressed in the morning in England (Woodward 2007), which shows that denim acts as a kind of foundational bedrock to the typical wardrobe. Woodward notes that very commonly women will start by trying one or two more adventurous items of clothing, and then find they don’t have the confidence to select them on that particular day, and withdraw to the security of denim wearing. This in turn relates to a paper published in Fashion Theory by myself and Alison Clarke (Clarke and Miller 2002) which argues that it is this point of anxiety that should be central to the study of fashion, not the study of the industry.
So we have three extraordinary aspects of denim blue jeans, and it would be unreasonable to see them as merely coincidently in juxtaposition within this single garment. It is not just that denim turns out to have the capacity to be the most individualized and personal garment, but that it is simultaneously the exact opposite – the most global, ubiquitous and in effect anonymous garment that we possess. In short it manages within itself to encapsulate that well-worn phrase about the most local and the most global, and also to somehow address the core of the anxiety that exists in that relationship. Our manifesto paper argues that denim jeans are therefore one of the most profound forms of contemporary clothing, telling us a great deal about that same modernity that is the context for much of our more general discussion over the rhythms and routines of consumption. The degree to which distressed jeans matter is also evident in the strong feelings people have about them. Since June 2007, Woodward and I have been carrying out an ethnography of denim jeans consumption in three streets in North London. Already we have found that when people are talking about their jeans consumption, many consumers, especially older consumers, are adamant about the degree to which they would never, under any circumstances, wear distressed jeans, and have equally strong feelings about the circumstances under which other people also should not wear them, for example, at work.
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