So there are clear contrasts between these two phenomena of buying time. Yet I would argue that understanding the junk/antique market as a machine for the suppression of time provides by analogy an explanation also for distressed blue denim jeans. As argued above, both are founded in the same paradoxical relation between the person and impersonal. In the case of blue denim jeans there is an equal threat of personal annihilation. But it is not that of death, but of consumers’ increasing consciousness of the anonymity and massivity of global modernity. As argued above (and in Miller and Woodward 2007), the paradox of blue denim jeans is that they are simultaneously both the most personal and the most global and ubiquitous of all garments. There are few objects that so fully objectify the modern sense of global homogenization as blue denim jeans. Despite rather than because of the fashion industry, they have become the default conformity with what everyone else is wearing at the moment across almost the entire world. It is this property, as observed by Woodward and myself, which allows them to act to help alleviate the intense anxieties that people experience on an almost daily basis when dressing. The same garment brings this ultimate depersonalization into direct relation with the most intense personalization the majority of people ever experienced of a garment, a personalization that is signified in the techniques of distressing.
If flea markets are the circulation of everyman or everywoman of the past, then blue denim jeans are the circulation of the generic humanity of the present. This may well be a reason why the most expensive labels in the denim world today tend to have names such as ‘citizens of humanity’, ‘seven for all mankind’ or ‘true religion’. I would think unwittingly these premium labels, which are all about adding value, evoke the place of jeans as something which links what otherwise might have seemed incommensurable, the extremes of the personal and the impersonal. In another paper I have shown that it is this process which has become foundational to the way we create value in the contemporary world (Miller 2008).
Buying Time
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