Clothing and Expressive Revolution: Wearing Jeans in Socialism

Abstract

This study investigates jeans use as well as the discursive practices that framed jeans-wearing in 1960s and 1970s socialist Yugoslavia. We adopt a practice theory approach that goes beyond the expressive capacity of jeans and focuses on their material and practical capacity as an epitome of cultural transformation. Practices discussed include embodied practices enabled by jeans and those that have jeans as their target, such as smuggling, dreaming, remaking, appreciation of authentic jeans and rejection of domestic substitutes, emotions about jeans, wearing jeans, and public narratives regarding jeans. We find that the significance of jeans-wearing was created by difficulty of access, the practice of semi-legal smuggling, contact with the West, and the “Italianness” of jeans. Jeans are conceptualized as a key point of connection between material and social transformation and a new structure of feeling, including the intimate experience of the body and its public presentation. We argue that the study of material artifacts as integral to certain practices helps us approach the larger systemic dimensions of (socialist) subjectivity and social transformation against the backdrop of the symbolic boundaries that divided East and West.

Keywords:

• jeans
• socialism
• practice theory
• informalization
• material expressive revolution
• getting dressed

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From the perspective of the affective turn in sociology and cultural studies, see Ruggerone’s (2017) argument against the minimization of the study of fashion to representational approaches and for the investigation of the feelings we experience about and in our clothes and the analysis of the body-clothes assemblage.

2 Although the meaning of jeans in the United States had already changed, 1962 was a milestone in jeans sales, with Levi Strauss & Co., for instance, doubling sales in only three years, with as much as a fivefold increase from 1965–1970 (Gordon 2015).

3 See Hammer (2007, 2011) on the social life of jeans in media representations, political discourse, and the reconstructed memories of jeans in Hungary emphasizing cultural governance and changing regimes of jean regulation from 1960 to 1980.

4 A digitized newspaper archive (Delo) that includes all Slovene-language print media in that time frame was searched for keywords “kavbojke,” “farmerke,” “farmarke,” and “farmerice” (all synonyms for jeans at that time).

5 We refer here to the collection of online text corpora used to compile the Dictionary of Standard Slovenian Language provided by the Fran Ramovž Institute of the Slovenian Language at ZRC-SAZU. Four existing text corpora of the Slovenian language were searched for keywords relating to jeans.

6 As quoted in the Statistical Yearbook (1964, 260), over just two years, from 1963 to 1965, the number of Yugoslav cars that crossed the Italian border grew from 3,678,814 to 11,000,000. For more on shopping and smuggling from Trieste, see Švab (2004), Mikula (2010), and Rolandi (2017); for more on the interactional practice of crossing the border and smuggling in socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, see Luthar (2006) and Luthar and Pušnik (2010).

7 According to dLib corpus (www.dlib.si), the term “kavbojke” (jeans) first appeared in the Slovenian language in 1955.

8 The daily newspaper Dnevnik (1977), for instance, quoted Marshall McLuhan, who stated in the 1960s that “…jeans are an expression of rage against the establishment and a sharp rejection of middle-class values. In sociological terms, they represent a protest against the loss of identity inherent in modern technology.”

9 See Warren and Campbell (2014) on the social constructedness and subjective and dynamic nature of coolness. See Reckwitz (2017) on the “creativity dispositive.”

10 In his analysis of branding, Arvidsson (2005) argues the immaterial labor of a consumer around a brand produces an “ethical surplus”—a social relation, shared meaning, emotional involvement. In informational capitalism, the ethical surplus represents the direct basis of its economic value that feeds into the production process.

11 The company Varteks signed a licensing agreement with Levi Strauss & Co. from San Francisco in 1983 and launched its manufacture of the popular Levi’s jeans in 1984. The manufacturing process was based in today’s Croatia, and the products were mostly intended for export and were produced until 2009, when Varteks lost its license, allegedly due to changes in the global jeans market.

12 The Soviet textile industry, in the context of a much more centralized and isolated economy, also started producing ersatz jeans during the 1970s. However, domestically produced jeans never succeeded in challenging the status of “real” jeans sold on the black market. As reported by Gronow and Zhuravlev (2005, 75), several attempts were made to buy denim fabric machines on license from the United States, but for some reason, their attempts did not succeed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency under grant [number P6-0400] (Social contract in the 21st century) and under grant [number J6-2576 (B)] (The creation of a new cultural field in the 1980s Slovenia: Civil society between nationalist policies and intercultural involvement).

Notes on contributors

Breda Luthar

Breda Luthar is a Professor of media and communication studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. She has a background in sociology and focus in her research on media and popular media, on the role of cultural practices in the construction of class distinctions, and on contemporary material/consumer culture.

Maruša Pušnik

Maruša Pušnik is a Professor of media studies at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include cultural history of media, popular culture and everyday life, media and collective memory, and fashion and media communication. She coedited (with Breda Luthar) a book Remembering Utopia: the culture of everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia (Washington, New Academia, 2010).