Blue Jeans by Miller Daniel

Author:Miller, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER 5

Ordinary

THE DEMARCATIONS OF JEANS

To say that the most extraordinary finding of this research is the discovery of ordinariness is clearly to suggest that being ordinary is not something one can take for granted. As later chapters of this book will argue, it is an achievement that in some ways has taken thousands of years, and comes into its present form only through new technologies that give us an imagination of a global ecumene that has no precedent. However, for the purposes of this chapter we will remain close to our ethnographic material of people's relationship to their jeans, and the larger historical and philosophical context and consequences will come later.

In this chapter we will examine claims about where it is not acceptable to wear jeans and what this implies. We will then explore the trajectory by which jeans move from being a marked garment to what we will call the post-semiotic phase, where jeans lose their capacity for any particular meaning or signification and thereby become far more important. This will include a discussion of how this works rather differently for men than for women. Next we will consider another factor that complements these: the rise of a sense of ubiquity manifested in jeans as default clothing, a kind of ersatz uniform. Finally, these come together in the ways in which jeans more positively assert an identity as ordinary, though for most people ordinary is constituted not by this assertion but more by the freedom from concern documented in the last chapter and the freedom from identity documented in this chapter.

The issue of jeans demarcating a terrain of acceptability and unacceptability was broached in previous chapters. What is remarkably consensual, especially given the diversity of origins for the people on these streets, is the agreement as to what exactly these areas turn out to be. A question we routinely asked was whether there were any circumstances in which it was not acceptable to wear jeans. These divide into two main categories: workplaces where there are explicit or implicit rules about not wearing jeans and social events at which it is considered inappropriate to wear jeans. With regard to work, many places require uniforms or have a dress code that precludes jeans; these include supermarkets and some other retail outlets. In certain other cases jeans have become specifically associated with a category of work, such as being a truck driver. Jeans can become almost a uniform within certain kinds of labor, usually various kinds of manual labor. Most people accept without question that there are many occupations in which people are expected to wear suits or the equivalent, and that this may be rule-based. More interesting are companies where employees are specifically instructed, “You can wear anything you like except for jeans.” One example of this is a bank; another is any hospital work that involves seeing a patient; a third is the police force and again refers to circumstance where an employee might meet the public. All of this makes jeans a strikingly marked type of apparel.

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