Social Semiotics Vol. 20, No.

3, June 2010, 293308

RESEARCH ARTICLE Fashioning the historical body: the political economy of denim
James B. Salazar*
Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (Received 17 April 2009; nal version received 3 December 2009) In this cultural history of denims emergence as a ubiquitous fashion element, coveted global commodity, and pre-eminent national icon, I argue that denims significance derives not from its celebrated comfort and utility, nor from its symbolic value, but rather from its ability to naturalize the body through a uniquely historicizing experience of utility itself. Denim not only memorializes the history of the lived body in its patterns of fading and fraying, it also locates that body within a nationalist historiography plotted in terms of the interlocking figures of the laborer, the cowboy, and the countercultural rebel. Denim thus fashions the body as a potentially political site of authenticity and self-possession that is both culturally mediated yet also imagined to be liberated from the symbolic demands of culture itself. Such a reading of denim thus calls for a rethinking of the Marxist conception of the commodity fetish, while also complicating scholarly understandings of clothing as a semiotic instrument of self-expression. Keywords: denim; embodiment; fetishism; national types; class; historicization; fashion

Introduction While denim or serge de Nmes that particularly dense weave of cotton from Nmes, France has been manufactured since the late sixteenth century, it was not until 1870 that this enduring fabric was significantly tailored into the text of American culture. Since its emergence within the frontier economy languishing in the afterglow of the California Gold Rush, denim has thoroughly and insistently infiltrated the fashion habits of contemporary American society, insinuating itself across the performative ensembles of class, race and gender while also emerging as one of the most pervasive fashion commodities in the global marketplace. Indeed, denim operates within the fashion and cultural system with unparalleled potency, polyvalency, and fluidity working both as an element of fashion as well as a site in which an anti-fashion (Gordon 1991) rhetoric and refusal of sartorially marked subject positions is asserted and articulated around a conception of the real, natural, down-to-earth body. Testifying to the evocative power of that body, Levi Strauss and Co. remade itself from a dry-goods wholesaler into one of the worlds largest brand-name clothing manufacturers and most successful international purveyor of the authentic American body by marketing the spectacular
*Email: jsalazar@temple.edu
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10350331003722851 http://www.informaworld.com

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utility of denim, a utility that also underwrote denims appeal as an anti-fashion fashion in the feminist, anti-war, and anti-consumerist movements of the 1960s. Denims canonization as a paradigmatic icon of American culture has perhaps been most explicitly marked by the inclusion of an early pair of Levis jeans in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where they have been displayed alongside other Treasures of American History such as Thomas Jeffersons Bible and Susan B. Anthonys shawl (Kendrick and Liebhold 2006). Denims prominence in the fashion system and nationalist imaginary of the United States, however, derives not simply from its celebrated comfort and usefulness, but rather from its power to evoke at the site of the body a nationalist historiography plotted in terms of the interlocking figures of the laborer, the cowboy, and the countercultural rebel. As the historian for the Levi Strauss & Co. summarizes in the companys marketing literature, denim . . . gives us a little bit of history every time we put it on (Downey 2007). This is not to say, however, that denims symbolic value is separable from its use value, from its promise to deliver the anonymity, comfort, and functionality of the natural body. The ability of denim to invest the body with this little bit of history is inseparable from its career as an eminently useful artifact; a career crowned by its delivery of the natural, everyday body as a culturally disavowing, politically empowered body. Denim is most often the fabric of choice for an engagement with nature, be it in the small garden plot of the suburbanites backyard, the backcountry expanse of a National Park, or the dirt and grime of the urban jungle. Like the anonymity and escape such spaces provide, denims ubiquity and relative uniformity also promises to provide relief from the burdens of fashion and social presentation. Denims currency within the US fashion system, ever since its construction into the prototypical form of jeans by the mountain tailor Jacob Davis, has turned not simply on its practical utility in situations of physical activity or labor, but more pointedly on its ability to conspicuously evoke and spectacularly display that utility in the manufactured materiality of the fabric itself, particularly in situations where its vaunted physical properties are not particularly important. From the carefully wrought and pre-aged fade to the more insistent markings of the manufactured tear and factory inscribed fray, denims cultural significance stems not simply from its usefulness but rather from its usefulness as a signifier of its own use-value, and hence from its ability to naturalize the body through the performative experience of utility itself. Denims overdetermined emblematization of its own instrumental properties, in other words, does not simply symbolize a prototypically American pragmatism nor translate usevalue into a commodified form of exchange value, but rather mediates the experience of the body by inscribing cultural meaning and, as Umberto Eco describes it, by impos[ing] a demeanor (Eco 1986, 192), through the performative experience of utility itself. The paradox of denims naturalization of the body is thus that it authorizes the body as the potential site of forms of authenticity and self-possession that are both culturally mediated yet also imagined to be liberated from the symbolic demands of culture itself. We might thus think of denim as situating the body at the crux of two distinct yet intersecting historicizing processes. Denim signifies its utility as the sheer temporal power of endurance, an endurance marked by the patterns of fraying and fading that also, over time, memorialize a personal history of the lived body and of its habits and movements. But denim also locates the body within a nationalist imaginary of iconic

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historical types, types that animate and inform the experience and agency of the naturalized body. Originally identified as the useful occupational clothing of goldrush laborers in the mountains of California, denim has come to promise the embodiment of the laborer by apportioning a body understood to be in a functional, and thereby natural, relation with the world. Such a figuration of the laborer, combined with the socially transgressive and self-reliant cowboy, underwrites the historical emergence of the countercultural rebel as a figure of liberal self-possession, critical acumen, and cultural disavowal. Denim is thus the site of a historicization that fashions a naturalized body through the nationalist fantasies of countercultural agency performed through and as the experience of use-value itself. In considering the case of denims spectacular success as iconic cultural artifact and fashion commodity, this article thus concerns itself with the following questions: how might we understand the cultural work performed by these intersecting historicisms at the site of denim, work that mediates the experience of the natural body? What exactly does it mean to wear a history and how might such a history animate the political agency and cultural liberation experienced through the naturalness of denim-clad body? How, in other words, might the case of denim complicate our understandings of the role of the body in articulating the discourse of nationalism, as well as our understandings of the semiotic work of ideology and fashion in structuring the experiences of the body itself ? While this article takes up these questions largely in the context of denims historical emergence as national icon and foundational fashion element in the United States, it also points the way towards a broader history of denim as an emblematic commodity within the transnational flows of labor and culture in the modern global economy. Denim not only has its origins as a textile in the colonial exchanges of early industrial capitalism, it also tells a more modern story of the forms of cultural and commercial value produced by the movements of transnational labor in modern global capitalism. Denims symbolic value within the United States, for example, stems from its power to evoke forms of manual and industrial labor that are increasingly outsourced to the developing economies of Latin America and the Far East or are performed by global migrants within the United States. Denims utility thus memorializes the transnational movement of labor within modern global capitalism, yet in the form of a nostalgia for the lost frontier of a national past. This capacity of denim to invoke forms of labor from which its wearers are increasingly divorced, moreover, is what also underwrites denims value in the international marketplace as a signifier of class status (Manzano 2009, 658).1 Such a value stems, in other words, not simply from denims identification with American culture, but rather from denims capacity to assert a symbolic relationship to labor in that identification with American culture, a symbolic relationship that thereby signifies its wearers liberation from the real conditions of manual labor that define class difference. The origin story The story of denims historical emergence as a popular commodity is one bound up with the origin story of the commodity itself. In many ways, denim stands as a representative artifact in the history of modern industrial capitalism, evoking in its rugged texture and utilitarian cut the gritty conditions and laboring bodies of the

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industrial revolution. Not only does denim bear such a history in the very meaning of its physical form, however, it also embodies the very logic of commodity fetishism itself in its capacity to produce the natural body through the symbolic exchanges of the fashion system. One of the key drivers of the industrial revolution in nineteenthcentury England was of course the textile industry, and the intercontinental transmutation of raw cotton into woven fabric, and woven fabric into finished clothing, is an economic process often identified as the engine of colonial capitalism. So central was the manufacture of clothing to the development of modern industrial capitalism that Marx begins his analysis of the dual character of the commodity in Capital with the example: 20 yards of linen equals one coat (1990, 131137). As Peter Stallybrass has detailed, Marxs anxiety over the fungibility of the coat and the effacement of its use-value by its value as an object of exchange also expresses the loss of warmth and protection of Marxs own useful coat when, because of his impoverished conditions while researching and writing Capital in the 1850s and early 1860s, he was forced to repeatedly exchange his much-needed coat for even-more-needed cash at the local pawnshop (Stallybrass 1998). The invention of the rivet-reinforced denim pant in 1870, only three years after Volume 1 of Capital was published, is similarly situated within a curiously symptomatic situation of need, and is thus well positioned also to tell the story of the tenuousness of the useful object within the capitalist mode of production. But rather than tracing the alienations of labor performed in the transformation of linen into the endlessly fungible forms of Marxs coat, the origin story of the rivet-reinforced denim pant complicates such an easy distinction between use and exchange value in the emergence of the commodity form, and thus tells a alternate story of the impact of the capitalist mode of production on the artifacts of material culture as well as on the artifactuality of the body itself. The origin story of the tailoring of the first pair of rivet-reinforced denim pants, now known as jeans, by the Nevada tailor Jacob Davis, and its subsequent development into a mass-produced cultural icon, describes not simply the utilitarian scene out of which this representative commodity emerged, but more importantly tells the story of the commodification of use-value itself within a fantasy of national and capitalist origins:2
By the time the woman customer knocked on his door in December 1870, Jacob Davis, thirty-nine years old, was shrouded in his faded dreams . . . I want a pair of pants for my husband, she told the tailor. I cant get a pair large enough to fit him in the stores. I want to send him up to chop some wood, but he has no pants to put on. . . . A laborer was hard on his clothes; a woodcutter, harder still. Davis nodded; clothes did not wear very well in the labor of the West. Teamsters, surveyors, miners had long complained that their garments came apart, especially where the pockets were sewn to the pants. ... Davis cut the oversized garment from the tent fabric he had used on the horse blankets . . . he sewed rather than riveted as he did when attaching the front straps and crouper to the horse blankets. So when the pants were done, he later recalled, the rivets were lying on the table. And the thought struck me to fasten the pockets with those rivets. . . . I did not make a big thing of it. I sold those pants and never thought of it for a time. (Cray 1978, 1719)

By July 1872, however, the tailor Davis had a problem. The pants he had designed and made had consistently proven their usefulness in the rugged conditions of mountain labor and hence had, through word of mouth, come more and more into

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demand. Struggling within the confines of his small shop, he could not keep up with demand. So he sent a letter to the dry goods wholesaler Levi Strauss & Co., from whom he had been purchasing his bolts of denim fabric. His proposal to the company was simple and direct; they submit and pay for the petition, which Davis himself could not afford, to patent the design of the rivet-reinforced denim pant, with Davis listed as inventor, in exchange for certain rights of manufacture. The company, impressed by the possibilities for profit in the manufacture of the garment, agreed, and after securing the patent also offered to hire Davis to supervise the manufacture of the garment on a large scale in San Francisco (Cray 1978, 2022). The successful commodification of the rivet-reinforced denim pant is attested to today by the subsumption of the object under the name of the capitalist. Denim pants are now Levis, and Levis has become the dictionary entry for rivetreinforced denim pants. In the quite elaborate promotional literature that the company has posted on the archival Heritage section of its website, the erasure of the inventor Jacob Davis by the capitalist Levi Strauss takes the form of a strategic conflation of invention and commodification. While Jacob Davis is recognized as the man who not only invented (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009a) rivet-reinforced denim pants but who also had made and sold two hundred pairs of the riveted pants (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009b) for miners in the Reno area beginning in 1870, it is Levi Strausss assistance in purchasing the patent in 1873 that truly marks the invention of the blue jean (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009c). Thus in the history told by Levi Strauss & Co., 1873 becomes the year we created the worlds first blue jean (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009e); the year that the blue jean was born (Downey 2008). This rewriting of the origin story is not so much a deliberate denial, but more a redefinition of what constitutes the creative act. The creative act in the capitalist economy becomes the development of the product for exchange in the market. As one early biography of Strauss put it:
the idea of making pants from tent canvas may have come from Levi or from a miner who was tired of losing his small stake of gold dust through a hole in his pocket. But it was bound to happen. The market was recognized by Levi, an intuitive marketing man, and a new product was born. (Van Steenwyk 1988, 3132)

Just as Strauss becomes inventor in the reconstructed history of denim pants, however, so too is Davis oddly transformed into a capitalist in the companys historical literature, which cites a 1903 City Directory listing of Davis as capitalist even though Davis spent 33 years supervising and running the companys production line and eventually sold his interest in the patent in the later years of his life (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009b). The history of denim thus seems to tell a classical story of the mystification of the laboring body and of the originary scene of need and material making by the act of capitalist appropriation, an act in which the inventors production of use-value is logically and historically eclipsed by the capitalists recognition of market value. What is unusual about the commodification of denim, however, is that it does not so much occlude and eclipse that scene of authentic labor, but rather mythologizes that scene as the very meaning of the commodity itself, a mythologization that is thereby transformed into an origin story of the American nation. Denim not only cloaks the body with the natural authenticity of the laboring body, it also delivers the natural body as itself a product of commodity culture and the abstractions from the laboring

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body it inaugurates. Rather than reading this artificially naturalized body as a mystification of an originary, naturally laboring, pre-capitalist body, however, what I would like to suggest is that the body naturalized by denim is one that makes visible the process of artifactualization that Marx himself locates within such a precapitalist body as it turns to labor for relief from the natural state of its own embodiment. Thus, rather than occluding, mediating, or interrupting a natural circuit of need that labor is imagined to serve, denim makes visible, in its symbolic adumbrations, the process of artifactualization inherent to the act of labor itself. The origin story of denim is thus an illuminating example of the ways that commodity culture marks not an alienation from the natural reality of the laboring body, but rather interrupts the process of self-transformation through which the laboring body seeks to transform itself into a social artifact, an artifactuality that denim, in its evocation of the natural body, promises to symbolically complete. We might thus understand the cultural significance of denim in terms of what Elaine Scarry (1985), in her innovative reading of Marxs Capital in The body in pain, describes as the process of projection and reciprocation, a process through which labor reflexively remakes the body into one artificially relieved from the burden of its own embodiment through the production of useful objects. In bearing and reflecting the structure of need that motivates labor, useful objects are, according to Scarry, the result of a projection of embodied sentience out into the world as the artifacts of material culture artifacts that then, through an act of reciprocation, remake the body into a materially enhanced and socially mediated artifact. Thus rather than reading in Marx a lament over the primitive fetishism associated with the commodity form, Scarry locates in Marx a theory of projection that understands the made world of useful artifacts as itself an extension of the body that animates artifacts with their own forms of embodied sentience. In the promotional literature of Levis and other prominent manufacturers of denim clothing, denims vaunted utility a utility that quickly led to their great popularity in the mining communities of the Sierra Nevada mountains is similarly evoked in terms of its embodied sentience. Denim, for example, materially mimes both the parts and the functions of the body. Searss Toughskins translate cloth into an artificially enhanced second skin that promises to shield the body from its abrading contact with the world. Levis jeans are shrink to fit in that they individualize themselves to the specific contours of a particular body, shaping themselves to that body and, over time, actually taking on and memorializing the shape of that body. Like the shroud of Turin, denim pants, in their own process of aging, produce over time a faint physical image of the body by painting in the shades and fraying of its canvas the habits of the body, its ways of sitting and walking, and even the objects it habitually carries. As Rachel Louise Snyder describes it in her study of international denim manufacturers, perhaps the single most common theme among those who work with denim is the idea that it changes along with you, that it could be a map for future archeologists of our modern life (Snyder 2008, 105). The embodied sentience projected as the utility of denim is thus one that animates denim with the responsibilities, awarenesses, and capabilities characteristic of human agency. Or as one designer of denim textiles puts it, denim is a living thing. You treat it differently than other fabrics . . . You understand its soul (Snyder 2008, 106). The denim pants worn by the woodcutters, miners, and ranch hands of

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the late-nineteenth-century American frontier, for example, are described in early Levi Strauss & Co. promotional literature as brave and hard-working, while during the Great Depression Levis jeans were vital friends in a time when the smallest thing could make a difference.3 Denim pants, moreover, do not just symbolize frontier independence, democratic idealism, [and] social change, they embody freedom and individuality and are young at heart (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009f). What distinguishes denim as a textile is that it is an honest fabric substantial, forthright, and unpretentious (Downey 2007). The embodied sentience of the artifact is perhaps most graphically invoked in Levis famous authentication of the strength of their pants by tying them to two horses who then attempt to pull the jeans apart. Emblazoned and evoked in rather disturbing form on the Two Horse Brand label affixed to every pair of Levis is the portrait of the drawing and halving of the body of the pants, disturbingly evoking the dismemberment by quartering used in torture to extract the truth lodged within the human body. The point of this investment of labor in the useful artifact is of course so that it may return to the body in the form of the objects usefulness, a form of reciprocation whose purpose is to supplement, augment, and remake the capabilities of the body. In the utilitarian scene of the origin story, denim pants are thus figured as that which remakes the woodcutters body into a artificially enhanced one, an artifactual body that can now withstand the abrasions of wood and brush, the flying chips of the axe-strike, and the damp cold of the mountain forest, while also offering to carry its heavy tools in its strengthened pockets. Hence the artifact comes to stand as the pivot point in a remaking of the body into a better one, a warmer and more protected one, whose powers are extended and amplified by the useful object. The point of such a remaking of the artifactual body is to relieve the body of its pains and discomforts, to relieve the body of its embodied awareness. Denim enables the miner in part to forget about his legs, in other words, because it prevents the cuts and abrasions that painfully insist on embodied awareness. As Scarry puts it, the made world is the human beings body and . . . having projected that body into the made world, men and women are themselves disembodied, spiritualized. A made thing remade not to have a body, the person is himself an artifact (1985, 244). As the case of denim makes clear, Marxs famous critique of the fetishism of the commodity form might be understood not as a rejection of animism, but rather as a defense of the more reciprocating animism produced in the world of useful objects; an animism that not only remakes the body into an artifact, but that also socializes the body by externalizing the interiority and privacy of sentience itself.4 Not only are the useful artifacts of material culture animated by the embodied needs and forms of sentience invested in them by the conditions of labor and use, they are also the mechanism through which sentience is itself restructured in terms of the social landmarks of material culture just as the body is remade into a public, socially patterned artifact. The body projects itself out into artifacts, including the artifacts of language and ideas, and brings back into itself the modalities of artifactual intervention that demarcate the landmarks of the social world. This socialization of sentience is very literally a restructuring not only of the powers of the body to work, but also is a restructuring, as a cultural artifact, of the cognitive and perceptual orders that govern the bodys access to, and perspective on, both the world and itself.

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The danger of the rupture introduced by the fetishization of the commodity form in this movement of projection and reciprocation is thus not that it refigures the natural labor of the body in terms of the abstract, artificial form of the commodity, but rather that it interrupts the process of the bodys own artifactualization and socialization. Rather than subjecting the laboring body to the abstractions of commodity culture, in other words, this interruption denies the laboring body the relief of abstraction, the relief from embodiment promised by the artifactual disembodying of the body itself. The laboring body is thus left to languish in the natural embodiment of its own labor as it brings itself into the intensified embodiment of work without the recompense of its own artifactual disembodiment. The capitalist, on the other hand, through his or her accumulation of capital and exemption from physical labor, becomes increasingly disembodied as he or she luxuriates in the reciprocating benefits of accumulated commodities. The capitalist no longer participates in the heightened embodiment of physical labor, and at the same time is enabled to surround him or herself with a surplus of the luxuries that comfort and soothe the body and that, like the modes of self-cultivation such a surplus might enable, produces a surfeit of artifactuality and disembodiment. In this rereading of the commodity form occasioned by the case of denim, class difference thus appears as the difference in degrees of embodiment as the commodity accrues and withholds the sensuousness of its projected, embodied sentience, or what Marx famously calls fetishism:
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it . . . But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. (Marx 1990, 163)

Hence while Marx seems to champion the social nature of useful artifacts, what he warns against is overlooking the fact that they are only conduits, and not selfsufficient agents, in the social relations between individuals and, more importantly, in the relationship of individuals to their own bodies. For it is when the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own (Marx 1990, 165), rather than as animated extensions of the human body, that the fetishized commodity assumes the mantle of agency and arrests the reciprocal, disembodied effects of use-value. We might thus think of Marxs critique of the commodity form not as an argument against fetishism but rather as a critique of the incompleteness of the fetishizing act. The problem, in other words, is not that the fetishized commodity replaces the human reality that is its source, but rather that the commodity interrupts the remaking of the body as a socially animated and disembodied artifact that labor seeks to produce. The commodity interrupts, that is, the originary fetishization of the body itself. Embodying the nation What is interesting about the emergence of denim as one of the most successful commodities of the modern era is thus not its mystification but rather its memorialization of the process of commodification through the spectacular display of its own use-value and, more importantly, its promise in that memorialization to

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redress the disparities of embodiment commodity capitalism itself produces. Denim is today without question much more than an eminently useful garment, it is a fashion, and as such it is worn by many, and in certain places almost exclusively, by those whose daily lives are far removed from situations of manual labor. Clearly denim functions for many in the ways it was intended by Jacob Davis and the miners, woodcutters, and laborers of the Old West. Denim has also not lost its usefulness in many blue-collar trades and work situations. Yet the prevalence of denim throughout a culture in which the conditions of labor differ radically from the early American West indicates that this material plays a major role in this culture apart from its useful qualities. As John Fiske puts it in Understanding popular culture, the functionality of jeans is the precondition of their popularity, but does not explain it (1989, 1). We might thus understand contemporary appropriations of denim by what might count as the more disembodied classes as an attempt to remake their class body, to put on the body of the working class by wearing the fetishized artifact of the laborers intensified embodiment. Denims cultural value seems to be grounded, in other words, in its promise to renegotiate the distribution of degrees of embodiment in the various class bodies, a process of reclassification that operates through the mythical rendering of what is envisioned as the working-class body. This evocation of the embodiment of the laborer by denim thus recognizes class difference while at the same time disavowing that difference through the universal experience of the casual, natural, denim-clad body, a body that marks this disavowal in the transformation of the experience of labor into a form of leisure. This evocation of the laboring body by denim not only produces the domain of leisure as the cultural site of class erasure; it also transforms the denim-clad body into the site of a historical fantasy of the nation itself. What is most significant about denims transformation from useful artifact into cultural icon is its ability to signify use-value through the conspicuous display of its own durability. Hence the ideal, if not always most common, condition of denim is faded, a condition that displays durability in the sheer ability of the fabric to outlast even the saturating tenacity of dye in the inexorable return to an unmodified, naturally colored state. That the popularity of faded denim is linked not to the color itself, but rather to its display of a persistent longevity, is evidenced by techniques such as stone-washing, whereby a display of endurance is sought from the start and has to be carefully reproduced through an actual acceleration of the temporal process of weathering. The horizontal tears that frequently emerge in jeans, while at one level merely a consequence of use and bending knees, enters into the signifying ideology of the pant by displaying a failure of the material that nonetheless, through its failure, foregrounds the structural integrity and durability of the pant as a whole. That denim operates as a sign in this way is apparent in the case of the distressed or pre-ripped jeans, or what Levis currently calls their destructed washes, where the material is scored with multiple slashes and rips that in extreme cases actually begin to undermine, in their effort to display, the structural integrity of the garment. Rather than simply displaying its own use-value in its exemplification of durability, however, denim enters into a signifying structure that situates the wearer within a performative ensemble and affective orientation governed by the historical image of work. This is perhaps most apparent in the more recent popularity of what manufacturers such as Gap refer to as the vintage wash, a manufacturing process in which the artificial weathering of jeans is engineered to evoke not simply a

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history of personal use but history itself through the citation of denim styles and textures from specific periods in the historical past. Or as Levi Strauss and Co. put it in the description of their Vintage Clothing collection, we faithfully recreate original iconic garments from meaningful eras in our past, making them as inspirational for todays pioneers as to those who first wore them (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009d). Denim signifies, in other words, not just its own utility but, more importantly, the many historical scenes of work in which it is imagined to have played such an important role. In its origin story, the durability of denim served the needs of work as it was understood in the historical moment of the Old West. In positioning itself as an image situated amongst, and in relation to, images of work in the Old West, denim thus enters into an overdetermined signifying chain in which a kind of nationalist historiography is reproduced through the experience of the natural body. One of the most important purveyors of such a historiography is of course Levi Strauss & Co., who have long worked to rehabilitate both the historically contemporaneous figures of the miner and the cowboy in their advertising genealogies of the wearers of denim in the Old West in order to legitimate denims ultimate popularity as the fashion of the anti-fashion rebel. The historical source of the figure of labor is the miner, who is recapitulated in the reconstructed Heritage of the Levi Strauss & Co. in figures such as the lumberjack, farmer, factory worker, and construction worker. More recently, the company has strategically adapted the discourse of labor to that of economic crisis by developing a product line within its Vintage Clothing collection called Wrath and Dust, which celebrat[es] . . . the spirit of the Dust Bowl migrants who were forced to move from their homes in the 1930s (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009d).5 In these various evocations of historical labor, Denim does not so much identify its wearers as workers, however, but more situates them within a structure of values within which work forms an element of an ideology. Hence one finds denim-colored cotton shirts, which offer all the semantic properties of denim but none of the practical. Indeed, class in the United States has long been articulated in terms of a fundamental division into blue-collar and white-collar workers, a distinction predicated on denims power to itself signify class difference not in terms of income but by evoking the artifactually enhanced working-class body. Denim has also become the most common article of leisure wear even though it does so through its insistent reference to work and yet remains a taboo element in the formal dress codes of class-marked events, thus operating both as an erasure of class difference as well as a maintainer of it. Denim is pivotal in the sartorial markings of class along an evaluative index of formality and informality; prestige restaurants forbid the wearing of denim, and private schools systematically exclude denim from their dress codes. Such an index of class is predicated upon a formcontent distinction, where the disembodiment of a contentless formality is contrasted with the excessive embodiment marked in the informality of useful denim. And yet the very body that is repudiated as informal becomes the very body appropriated by the leisure classes in their free time. Indeed it seems almost definitive of denim that it be worn outside the job, outside ones official workplace, despite the fact that it is an article of occupational clothing that originated in the challenging conditions of physical labor. Similarly, the relaxation of corporate dress codes, particularly in the high-tech industry, signals a further appropriation of the

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casualness and naturalness of denim, and yet in a way that maintains certain markers of class status. Which is all to say that denim has come to be the emblem of the casual and of leisure through its being simultaneously the image of leisures antagonist; namely, work.6 Denim thus articulates an ideological antagonism within American culture itself, working through that antagonism in the meaning of its very materiality. What we see happening in these apparent breakdowns in class difference is thus more of a targeted appropriation of certain ideological aspects of denim, and not others. The casual, natural body that denim apportions is one that is dependent upon the codes of formality and informality in fashion which were written along and as class difference, yet in white-collar appropriations of denim the class aspect is in a way suppressed, or de-emphasized, in order to bring to the fore the more general codings of the body engaged with materiality, with the workings of things and of nature that derive from the worker figure, and which are elaborated in the next major cultural figure historicized through the materiality of denim. Denims contradictory place within the cultural field of sartorially-marked class positions particularly its emergence in contradistinction to formality as such underwrite its role in the constitution of a particularly iconically American character, the denim-clad cowboy. The association of denim with the cowboy of the frontier is particularly interesting when one considers the fact that the initial rise in popularity of denim in the late 1800s corresponds with an actual decline in the prevalence of the cowboy and pioneer.7 Levis, in other words, were to a large extent absent from the historical period they have come to represent, and thus provide a stark example of the ways that fashion has functioned in the reconstruction, as fashion theorist Nathan Joseph puts it, of a past [which is] nothing more than the present stereotype of bygone eras (Joseph 1986, 108). While the fashion configuration of the cowboy clearly derives in part from the occupational clothing of the cowboy in the late 1880s, there were many differences in the outfit according to the needs of different regions and occupations. While occupational clothing itself is very often a central element the development of a sartorial vocabulary of stereotypes, cultural exemplars, and free associations (Joseph 1986, 103), the cowboy uniform and denims place in it only cohered in the 1920s when the homogenizing influence of films and mail order catalogues created a universal style (Joseph 1986, 123). Hence the universal style of the cowboy reconfigures the traits and conditions of the late-nineteenth-century frontier economy in terms of a nationally representative character. While this evocation of the cowboy can at the same time be an evocation of the cowboy as worker, it most often is not. The image or myth of the cowboy is not one of the contracted cattle herder who most commonly lived in bunk houses with other herders, but rather of a man on horseback roaming the wild (preferably desert) environment between fledgling towns, camping and fitting himself into and taming the wilderness, but not necessarily living off the land. The cowboy is supplied by the town merchant and takes his coffee into the culturally desolate wilderness. Yet the cowboy equally reenters the community as a distributor of justice who, while one of the simple folk, is nonetheless an adept of the complex social gaming of the saloon and parlor room. The cowboy character, in other words, is liminally situated at the margins of both society and the law, and finds its expression by negotiating those margins for both personal gain and the civic good.

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Hence, among the many elements of this polymorphous myth, denim trucks in the symbolic codes of the cowboy as a figure of the liberal subject and defender of individualism and personal liberty. The cowboy has become a symbol of a preindustrial American past through the power of denim to evoke a pre-capitalist body, a past in which the cowboy can survive through his own efforts and his ability to play with, and yet not be contained by, the social economy of the town. Within this symbology, the clothing of the cowboy becomes a symbolic shorthand; any person can express his self-image and beliefs or lay claim to a social position and style of life by borrowing the apparel of the exemplar (Joseph 1986, 105), a shorthand through which a range of iconic types are derived, including the truck driver, the urban cowboy, and the soldier of fortune. While denims place in the outfit of the cowboy charges that figure with the class significations earlier described, the semantic dimensions of denim are also ramified through their affiliation with a number of broader cultural discourses available through the figure of the cowboy. Hence, within the internally metonymic whole of the outfit, particular elements such as denim can stand out and develop independently from the metaphoric whole. In other words, while denim works as part of the costume of the cowboy, as an individual item in everyday dress, in many contexts of use, it can evoke very specific elements associated with the cowboy and not others. Indeed, as we will see, denim participates in and enables political and cultural repudiations of the nationalist values emblematized by the cowboy, yet often through an appeal to a kind of agency figured through this dominant cultural trope. The last thing, for example, that a punker wants to be is a cowboy, yet both make recourse to many of the same meanings emblematized by denim. Nonetheless, in naturalizing the setting of a kind of working-class body, the denim-clad cowboy is a crucial installment in the elaboration of a naturalized body that stands in a critical, yet parasitic, relationship to society. Hence the unmediated functional relation to the world supposed of the working-class body is associated with the cowboys complex relation to nature, one that inherently stands in a transgressive and critical relation to the social field of the town. Countering the culture of fashion It is this conjuncture of the semiotics of the cowboy with the class-marked codes of the formal and the casual, revalorized as the artificial and the real, that enables and underwrites the final symbolic iteration of denim. Since denim can represent the antiartifice, yet socially liminal body, the wearing of denim can thereby function, because of its origins in the nationalist imaginary of the class fashion system, to also produce the countercultural body, the body of the rebel who refuses the cultural dictates of the hegemonic fashion system. While denims association with the rebel figure popularized in 1950s popular cinema the period in which denims pervasiveness as the uniform of youth culture in the United States was established has often been recognized, the particular ways that denim itself forges a proliferating semiotic relay between these different historical and cultural codes has been less explored. Levi Strauss & Co.s appropriation of the countercultural movement in their corporate mission statement, for example, weaves a historical thread that identifies the countercultural and anti-war movements of the 1960s with not only the expansionist

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figure of cowboy, but also with the nationalist figure of the soldier and anticommunism of the Cold War:
Generations of people have worn our products as a symbol of freedom and selfexpression in the face of adversity, challenge and social change. They forged a new territory called the American West. They fought in wars for peace. They instigated counterculture revolutions. They tore down the Berlin Wall. Reverent, irreverent they all took a stand. (Levi Strauss and Co. 2009f)

This construal of the political and social agency that denim fashions, in its appropriation and inversion of the logic of the proletarian struggle, legitimates a countercultural ethos through a conferral of the authority of the pioneers body onto the nationalist labor of war and the victory of capitalism over communism. The people who took a stand are thus not exactly those who stood up to totalitarian regimes from behind the Berlin Wall, but rather those World War II veterans who triumphed over fascism and ultimately won the Cold War from outside the Berlin Wall; the irony being of course that these defenders of capitalism are also identified with the hippies who took a stand against the environmental dangers and cultural conformity of modern consumer capitalism. This is not to suggest that denim has some causal role in the diversity of civil rights struggles, antiwar sentiments, and anti-consumerism of the 1960s. As Lee Quinby has put it: the civil rights struggles that were waged in the sixties did not require jeans, but as signifiers of rejection of bourgeois values blue jeans did advance New Left challenges (1994, 9). The extraordinary popularity of denim during the 1960s, while prefigured by the jeans-and-tee-shirt-wearing rebel of the 1950s, has its roots in denims ability to figure a countercultural agency through the iconic condensation of the pre-capitalist laborer and the anti-cultural cowboy onto the body of the wearer. Through a complex discursive chain in which codes of self-reliance, of an unmediated relationship with a wild nature, and of a functional dexterity with raw materials all coalesce in the spectacle of its use-value, denim is able to locate the body within a countercultural space through the experience of an authentic, natural body that is imaginatively if not actually empowered and liberated by a sense of its own utility. While the countercultural agency of such a naturalized body has been historically mobilized as a basis for political and cultural critique, we might understand denims broader cultural appeal as grounded in the escape that it is imagined to provide from culture itself, an escape in particular from the expectations and symbolic economies marked in the workplace and public space by the fashion system. Thus, while denim historicizes the body within a discourse of iconic national types, the naturalization of that body also depends upon an occlusion or disavowal of the traces of its own cultural and historical meaning. Not only is denim able to naturalize the body because of its associations with the laborer, the cowboy, and the rebel, but its saturation of and universality within the fashion system also enables it to be the uniform of everyone and anyone. Denim puts its wearer under a kind of class, race, and gender erasure, an erasure whose promise lay in the anonymity of leisure and the universality of denim in public space. In its genericization of the body, denim thus carves out for its wearer a zone a privacy and anonymity within the visual economy of the public sphere, one that is indispensable to the social passings that enable ones passage through or presence within a variety of public

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spaces and cultural locations. This is of course not to say that denim does not also play a key role in the articulation of social distinctions through its evolving styles and forms, nor that denims naturalization of the body explains all of the ways that denim functions within the fashion system. Denims broader cultural value across race, class, and gender lines, however, is nonetheless rooted in its power not to articulate distinctions within the cultural and social hierarchies of the fashion system, but rather to enable a liberal fantasy of exchangeable bodies, social equality, and cultural mobility, a fantasy predicated on the very class inequalities it is meant to redress. As Charles Reich famously articulated this fantasy at the end of the 1960s:
Jeans make one conscious of the body, not as something separate from the face but as part of the whole individual . . . The new clothes express profoundly democratic values. There are no distinctions of wealth or status, no elitism; people confront one another shorn of these distinctions . . . the new clothes make it possible for people to be as direct, honest, and natural with each other as possible, given other barriers. To the extent that clothes can do it, people have the opportunity to meet one another as real, total persons, mind, face, and body, not defended or walled off by an barriers or certifications. (Reich 1970, 236 and 238239)

The case of denim thus makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the ways that culture and history intervene upon and constitute what gets taken as the natural body. Denim articulates a nodal point in ideology around which the mythic figures of the frontier cowboy, the working-class man, and the countercultural rebel participate in a semiotic and performative reconstruction of the casual, natural, down-to-earth, anti-fashion body. Denim is thus the site of a historicization of the body, a historicization that fashions a naturalized body through the fantasies of countercultural agency that are performed through and as the screen of use-value itself. The ideological work of denim, therefore, demonstrates how the items and artifacts of material culture themselves historicize the lived body not simply through the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural representations and forms of symbolic value, but also by shaping the bodys experience of and relationship to its own utility. Such a reading of denim thus hopes to contribute to an understanding of the ways that the experience of utility can be an instrument of cultural inscription on the body, one that requires a rethinking of the Marxist conception of the commodity fetish, as well as of the assumption that clothing functions simply as a mode of selfexpression within the sartorial vocabulary and cultural codes of the fashion system. Notes
1. For a fuller account of denims place in the broader global marketplace, see Rachel Louise Snyders (2008) Fugitive denim. 2. The term jeans was only adopted by the Levi Strauss Co. around 1960, after recognizing the currency of the term in the youth culture of the late 1950s. The term seems to come from the word genes used to describe a style of pants similar to the Levis pant, but made of a lighter material woven in, and originally worn by sailors from, the Italian port of Genoa in the seventeenth century. Levi Strauss, before coming to San Francisco, had himself sold jeans in Kentucky as a traveling peddler (Cray 1978, 2223). See also (Gordon 1991, 31). 3. Advertising language from the Levi Strauss and Companys 2008 Wrath and Dust Vintage Clothing Collection is cited from the Oki-Ni international clothing retailer website. http://www.oki-ni.com/icat/levis. 4. As Scarry puts it: If the conditions of sentience are objectied, made social, placed in universal exchange, one of the most essential facts about sentience has been eliminated its

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deep privacy, its connement of its own experience of itself to itself, its being felt only by the one whose feeling it is. In civilization, as in the early altars of a religious culture, the body is turned inside-out and made sharable (1985, 252). Or as Eco more specically argues: with my new jeans my life was entirely exterior: I thought about the relationship between me and my pants, and the relationship between my pants and me and the society we lived in. I had achieved . . . an epidermic self-awareness (Eco 1986, 194). 5. What is perhaps most interesting about this gure of the laborer in crisis is that it is one primarily promoted by Levis in the European markets. Although items from the Vintage Clothing collection are available in the United States, the marketing language of Wrath and Dust is not used to market them. 6. Roland Barthes describes a similar kind of paradox as a form of rationalization within the fashion system, one whose deliberate tendency [is] to make a signs rationale the very opposite of its physical character: discomfort reverses into comfort (Barthes 1985, 61). Such a rationalization is particularly true in the frequent justication of denim as preeminent leisure wear because of its presumed comfort, even though denim is certainly not the coolest, softest, or most exible fabric one can wear (Eco 1986). 7. Jeans are prominent, for example, in classic lm Westerns such as John Fords The Searchers as iconic clothing of frontier settlers and cowboys despite the fact that the setting of the lm two years after the Civil War is still three years prior to the invention of denim pants, and decades before the brand was manufactured in enough quantity to be distributed somewhere so far outside its original market base as Texas.

Notes on contributor
James Salazar is Assistant Professor of English at Temple University, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literature and culture, and race and gender studies.

References
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