Reference no: EM132475585
"Tradition and Modernity: The History of Jeans"
Sociologists like to contrast "tradition" and "modernity." Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber and even Marx developed theories that contrasted social patterns that existed "then" with those that exist "now." Such theories are enlightening. But thinking in terms of "tradition versus modernity" encourages us to conclude that the past and the present have little in common.
All the thinkers discussed in this chapter saw past and present as strikingly different. But it is also true that countless elements of today's society - ranging from religion to warfare - have been part of human society for a very long time. It is also the case that many cultural elements that we think of as "modern" turn out to have been around much longer than many of us realize.
One element of today's culture, popular among today's college students, that we think of as distinctly modern is jeans. This piece of clothing, which is common enough to be considered almost a "uniform" among young people, moved to the center of popular culture when it swept across the colleges campus in the late 1960s.
But many people would be surprised to learn that jeans have been worn for centuries. To understand more, consider the original meanings of the words used to define thy type of clothing. The term dungarees, a common name for jeans before the 1960s, is derived from the Hindi work dungri, a district of the Indian city Mumbai where the coarse cloth is thought to have originated. From there, the fabric spread westward into Europe. The term jeans can be traced back to the name of the Italian city of Genoa, where the cotton fabric was widely worn in the 1650s. Another word for the fabric, denim, refers to the French city of Nimes, reflecting the fact that somewhat later, people describe d the cloth as being "de Nimes."
Art historians have identified paintings from the sixteenth century that show people - typically the poor- wearing jeans. In the 1799s, British sailors used this fabric not only for making sails but also for constructing hammocks to slept in and for fashioning shipbroad clothing.
More than a century later, in 1853, U.S. clothing manufacture Levi Strauss sold dungarees to miners who were diggings for gold in the California gold rush. The familiar blue and white woven fabric is very strong and durable. Jeans became the clothing of choice among people who had limited budgets and who did demanding physical labor.
After gaining popularity among gold miners, jeans became popular among cowboys at all across the wesern United States. By the beginning of the twentieth century, jeans were worn by alsmot all working people, By the 1930s, most prisoners across the country also worn denim.
The pattern made jeans a lower symbol of lower social standing. This fact is surely the reason that many middle class people looked down on such clothing. As a result, especially in higher income comminites, pu blic school officials banned the wearing of dungarees by students.
By the 1960s, however, a youth-based counterculture was emerging in the United States. This new cultural orientation rejected the older pattern of "looking upward" and copying the styles of the rich and famous and , instead, began "looking downward" and adopted the look of working people and even the down and out. By the end of the 1960s, rock stars, Hollywood celebrities, and college students favored jeans as a way to make a statement that they identified with working people - part of the era's more left leaning political attitudes.
Of course, there was money to be made in this new trend. By the 1980s, the fashion industry was cashing in on the popularity of jeans by promoting "designer jeans" among more well-off people who probably had never entered a factory in their lives. In 1980, a teenage Brooke Shields helped launch Calvin Klein jeans that became all the rage among people who were able to spend three and four times as much as the jeans worn by ordinary people.
By the beginning of this century, jeans had become an accepted form of dress not only in schools but also in the corporate world. Many of the CEO's of U.S. corporations - especially in the high-tech fields - now routinely wear jeans to work and even to public events.
As you can see, jeans turn out to have a very long history. The fact that jeans existed both "then" and "now," all the while taking on new and different meanings, reveals the limitation of characterizing cultural elements as either "traditional or "modern" in a world in which societies invent and reinvent their way of life all the time.
What Do You Think?
1. Do you think the changing trend in the popularity of jeans suggests broader changes in our society before and after the 1960s? Explain.