Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 40

The average American consumer owns seven pairs of jeans, and college students practically live in them. The eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age group, which accounts for only 10 percent of our population, accounted for nearly 30 percent of spending on jeans in the year ending in October 2006—about $2.8 billion of the denim industry’s $8.6 billion annual income. Cotton and comfortable, “cool” and common, “down home” and upscale, jeans go with everything and they can go just about anywhere. They feel natural—and, in a way, they are—but they’re also cultural, and they reveal a lot about America’s culture of nature.⁹

In a television commercial for Cotton Incorporated, as a camera pans over stacks of jeans in a retail store to the beat of soft rock music, captions identify, humorously, different styles of jeans: “Low Rise Jeans. Boot Cut Jeans. Skinny Jeans. Not Feeling So Skinny Jeans. Walk The Dog Jeans. Make Him Pant Like A Dog Jeans. Turns Butts Into Booty Jeans.” For the 2007 “Back to College” season, Old Navy featured “New Denim/New You,” with three different fits (and functions) for women—the Diva, the Flirt, and the Sweetheart. “Steal the spotlight,” girls were advised, “in our show-stopping jeans.” As this suggests, one of the main functions of jeans is to attract attention—primarily to the bottom of a woman’s body. The Cotton Incorporated ad ends with an alleged truism, “You Can Never Have Enough Jeans.”¹⁰

Some college students express their affection for jeans on social media sites: “Blue Jeans Are Probably the Greatest Thing Ever”; “I’m just a blue Jeans and T-shirt type of girl”; “My name is _______ and I am a blue jean addict”; “I wear my blue jeans multiple times, and I’m proud of it!”—and “My jeans are worth more than your life!” There’s even a Facebook group called “I Use My Blue Jeans As A Napkin.”

The rise of designer jeans has only fanned the flames. Since the debut of the company Seven for All Mankind (“Sevens”) in 2000, many American women have decided that jeans capable of elongating the legs and lifting the butt are worth a lot of money. Blue Cult jeans marketed a line actually called “Butt Lifters.” For genuine jean lovers, money is no object. As one Berkeley student claimed in 2005, “I don’t care how much I spend on jeans, as long as they look good on me. ... I don’t mind spending three hundred dollars if they flatter my body.” Her favorite brand was True Religion, a profession of faith that has more to do with fashion and the marketplace than anything spiritual. To most male collegians, designer jeans are just pricey. But to a coed in the know—and women dress for each other as much as for men—they’re a mark of true distinction. True Religion’s logo, for example, is “Buddha” playing a guitar, and its distinctive designs include a signature horseshoe on the pockets and thick-threaded seams. Such signs and symbols are more than a highlight for the body; they’re conspicuous consumption spotlighting the size of our bank account, too.¹¹

When students buy jeans, therefore, it’s clear that they’re also buying meanings. Some of those meanings are historical. Jeans are Western, working-class, rebellious, hippie, and hip-hop. They remind us of Levi Strauss and California miners, generations of rugged cowboys, James Dean and fifties rebels without a cause, and Robert Moses and sixties rebels with a cause. As a result, paradoxically, they’re both cultural and countercultural—pants for all reasons.¹²