Consumption and Its Consequences by Daniel Miller

Author:Daniel Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

How jeans became ordinary

For this purpose we used the same technique I had devised originally for the shopping research, taking randomly selected streets and working with whoever happened to be living there. Initially, we intended to work on the question of the relationship of jeans to anxiety that I have just discussed, but as the study developed we came to appreciate that even more important was the capacity of jeans to objectify a state best understood as simply being ordinary. In our research we of course asked people about why they wore jeans. They often gave functional reasons, but, having studied jeans in several countries, I found that the people who claim they are good for when it is hot are contradicted by the majority who claim they are better for when it is cold, and those who see them as protective against rain are challenged by those who say that jeans are terrible in the rain, since they don’t dry very quickly. The fact that they fade might as easily have been used as evidence that they don’t last long as to make the case that they are enduring.

The single most common observation used to explain the preference for jeans is comfort, and it soon became clear that the very word ‘comfort’ provides an excellent example of what social scientists call naturalisation. What this means is that people start by using the word comfort to refer to the physical relationship to softened cotton. There seems no reason to dispute the report that jeans as a cotton garment feel softer and pleasanter to wear over time. Because this is a physical transformation, we regard it as natural. But very quickly the use of this term comfort drifts over into social situations where people say that wearing jeans makes them feel comfortable at a party or with certain friends. This time the property of being comfortable has nothing to do with natural comfort, but, because the same word is used, the effect is to make this cultural concept of being socially comfortable seem like the same kind of thing as the argument of comfort that stems from the properties of cotton – which in turn means we forget that this is a cultural observation, and the idea that denim is also socially appropriate comes to seem like a natural property of denim itself. In a similar manner, participants in this study defend their preference for jeans on the grounds that you don’t have to wash and iron them as often as other clothes. What they mean is that it is socially acceptable not to wash them as often or to iron them. But there is nothing intrinsic to jeans as a textile that dictates this. We could have felt the same about corduroy or any cotton trousers, but we don’t. It is just a cultural quirk that we feel we can wear dirty jeans but not dirty cords.

As I have already noted, while many women possessed branded or expensive or specially

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