The Symbolism Of Jeans During The Great Depression

“Within the social sciences many have argued that artefacts exist in inner environment where meaning and symbolic significance constantly change, the dynamics of which are of immediate relevance for processes of acquisition, consumption and use” (The design of everyday life (cultures of consumption Hand, M., Shove, E., Ingram, J. and Watons, p 118).

Nowadays, there are million of objects that changes their meaning and purpose throughout history. For instance, what do we know about Jeans? whatever we are interested in fashion or not there is 99 percent that you have seance in your wardrobe. Jeans are comfortable, casual item of everyday life is fashionable item.

Current cultural study text is an attempt to analyse Jeans as material and symbolic

They drew upon Western jeans as a symbolic resource as the pieces together a modern frontier parable that would become the dominant way of making sense of the Depression years and redefine Americans’ understanding of themselves and the nation.”

Jeans were not accepted as a fashion object until 1930, but in one short decade everything shifted.

Unremarkable denim fabric started to become a “gender- and class-blurring icon of the ‘American people’”. The Great Depression in 1950s became the impulse for the transformation. A series of circumstances pushed fashion industry in the US to “take up blue jeans as a stylistically and symbolically versatile, class- and gender-blurring national icon”.

Leslie Rabine and Susan Kasier explain changes in meaning of jeans on the consumption side in terms of shifts in everyday habits and emulation, such as increased leisure time or women’s right to work led to the need of casual

“In the article Vogue declared: ‘True western chic’ is an invention of the cowboy, ‘but the moment you stray away from(authentic cowboy) tenets, you will be lost.’ (Downey, 2007: 62).

On the other, production side, it is argued, that changes in technologies and mass-production “created the competition in the women’s ready-made garment industry to push manufacturers an retailers to market dungarees and other standardised garments in new ways in order to expand their markets compete with one another”, as written by Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold (Clarke, S., Fine, B. and Leopold, E. (1994) ‘The world of consumption’, Contemporary Sociology,)

In 1950s jeans advertisement started to be directed to the teenage client. 50s was the decade of rebels, rockabillies and other menaces of society. Jeans were first worn on the stage by Eddie Cochran. Before that moment jeans were considered only as a work or everyday wear and were not accepted by musicians as the type of clothes, that could be worn on the