Jeaning in America
Jeaning in America
• Though jeans are widely popular among everyone • Students to non-students and equally widespread among older age groups. • So thinking about jeans is as good a way as any to begin a book on popular culture. • Jeans are a supremely functional garment, comfortable, tough, sometimes cheap, and requiring “low maintenance” • The functionality of jeans is the precondition of their popularity, but does not explain it. • In particular, it does not explain the unique ability of jeans to transect almost every social category we can think of: we cannot define a jeans wearer by any of the major social category systems-gender, class, race, age, nation, religion, education. • We might argue that jeans have two main social foci, those of youth and the blue-collar or working class, but these foci should be seen as semiotic rather than sociological, that is, as centers of meaning rather than as social categories. • So a middle-aged executive wearing jeans as he shops in the suburbs on a Sunday is, among other things, aligning himself with youthful vigor and activity (in opposition to the distinctly middle-aged office desk). • The class wearing Jeans will not be a representative sample of the whole popluation. • And so the meanings they made of their jeans cannot be extended to other groups, but the process of making and communicating meanings is representative even though the meanings made by it are not • He asked his students to write about Jeans meant to them? • The terms that they associate with what jeans mean to them were different and similar at the same time • What they were basically doing is to alter the semiotic network differently, to make their own meanings within the shared grid. • One meaning is community integrative, that denied social differences. • Jeans are seen as informal, classless, unisex, and appropriate to city or country; wearing them was a sign of freedom
• Though jeans are widely popular among everyone • Students to non-students and equally widespread among older age groups. • So thinking about jeans is as good a way as any to begin a book on popular culture. • Jeans are a supremely functional garment, comfortable, tough, sometimes cheap, and requiring “low maintenance” • The functionality of jeans is the precondition of their popularity, but does not explain it. • In particular, it does not explain the unique ability of jeans to transect almost every social category we can think of: we cannot define a jeans wearer by any of the major social category systems-gender, class, race, age, nation, religion, education. • We might argue that jeans have two main social foci, those of youth and the blue-collar or working class, but these foci should be seen as semiotic rather than sociological, that is, as centers of meaning rather than as social categories. • So a middle-aged executive wearing jeans as he shops in the suburbs on a Sunday is, among other things, aligning himself with youthful vigor and activity (in opposition to the distinctly middle-aged office desk). • The class wearing Jeans will not be a representative sample of the whole popluation. • And so the meanings they made of their jeans cannot be extended to other groups, but the process of making and communicating meanings is representative even though the meanings made by it are not • He asked his students to write about Jeans meant to them? • The terms that they associate with what jeans mean to them were different and similar at the same time • What they were basically doing is to alter the semiotic network differently, to make their own meanings within the shared grid. • One meaning is community integrative, that denied social differences. • Jeans are seen as informal, classless, unisex, and appropriate to city or country; wearing them was a sign of freedom