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1. Denim
Daniel Miller
∗
Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, UK
This article introduces denim as a marketplace icon, and argues that blue jeans’
ordinariness and ubiquity transcend marketing practices. A brief history of blue
jeans is presented to illuminate their engagement with cultural practices, world
trade, and technology, in the form of color dyeing. The article invokes the notion
of the post-semiotic – the notion that it is possible to have consumer culture
objects that do not necessarily signify anything.
Keywords: blue jeans; clothing; denim; material culture; marketplace icon
Denim is an ideal object for thinking about marketplace icons more generally because it
transcends the very notion. The term “marketplace icon” suggests there is something
specific, a brand, an object, which captures you precisely because of its specificity.
Now, denim is not that at all. Denim is ubiquitous, it is ordinary, and actually many
of the people I studied who wear denim often do not even know what brand it is.
They get jeans in a supermarket. In a way, it allows them to create a relationship
with the world, which is other than going toward icons and brands and specificity.
This is true in some ways even for people who crave, and are connoisseurs of, the
specific. I have a thing about particular kinds of chocolate. I really like a particular
Greek honey. But at other times, I just want to relax. I do not want to care about it. I
want to have a relationship with the marketplace, which does not involve having to
think very much about what I am wearing. I go out to Marks and Spencer or to the
supermarket, buy a pair of jeans. Nobody looks at me, nobody cares – and I am suffi-
ciently clothed. Denim achieves this kind of significance, or going below the surface of
significance. You do not have to care what kind you are wearing. You actually are free
of anxiety or choice.
At the other end of the spectrum is the pair of jeans I gave to the National Folk
Museum of Korea in Seoul that is currently putting on an exhibition about my research
on denim (National Folk Museum of Korea 2014). When I bought these jeans, I decided
to go for a significant pair. I was in Brazil, and these jeans had what to me was the
epitome of significance, ecojeans made from organic cotton and real plant indigo.
They touched every kind of specialness in relation to denim. The problem with these
particular jeans was that the people producing them were so concerned to be
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
∗
Email: d.miller@ucl.ac.uk
Consumption Markets & Culture, 2015
Vol. 18, No. 4, 298–300, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1008193

2. ecofriendly that they were not particularly concerned; does your ass look good in these?
These were incredibly shapeless trousers that my wife decided were unacceptable even
if they might go a small way toward saving the planet. She thought this was not actually
equitable with the need for me to wear something that may be she could be seen with.
These jeans have ended up behind a glass screen as a museum exhibition object, which
would be unusual for one’s own trousers.
The point really is that jeans work best when they are the opposite of that, when they
are nondescript, what I call in my research the post-semiotic, or the idea that it is also
possible to have consumer material culture that really does not signify anything. It does
not mean gender, it does not mean wealth, and it does not mean design. Just wear it and
you do not have to worry about who people think you might be. And for me that is an
important substrate to the consideration of consumer iconicity, because in a way the
high notes of the “special” work well if you were to have base notes, the mundane,
the ordinary, against which it reverberates and makes music. I think that is how consu-
mer culture generally works. Most people do not want to have their special stuff all the
time, cuz then it ain’t special. They need to have that kind of resonance where it is pre-
cisely the comfortable ordinariness of a category like denim blue jeans that then allows
them to carry a fabulous accessory.
The ordinariness of denim is the antithesis of marketing. Think about the marketing
of clothes. You try to create brand, as in Levis. You also are trying to create fashion,
because if you want people to keep buying stuff, you need stuff to go out of fashion.
You need redundancy, you need change, you need dynamism. You actually want speci-
ficity, and you also want cost.
You want people to pay more for something that they have a reason to spend money
on. If you look at the market for denim blue jeans, this has expanded, and it has con-
tinued to expand. In the UK, for example, the big expansion is from shops like the
supermarkets Asda, which is owned by Walmart and Primark.
Jeans last longer than other clothes. They are the very opposite of what marketing
would like. Business has to sell blue jeans, because people want them, and no doubt
they make money from the mass marketing of cheap blue jeans. But you would be
crazy to think this is the result of commercial pressure or commercial desire. It is the
exact opposite, the last thing that people in commerce would want to be the case,
because they could not make less money out of it. It is the cheapest garment, it lasts,
we have it for the longest time, and we wear it more than we wear anything else. It
is in that sense an anti-commercial garment.
Of course, people can spend 200 dollars on a pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans.
Such a large arena allows for that. There are boyfriend jeans, and yes there are expens-
ive jeans with Swarovski crystals, of course there are; but they are not the bulk of jeans.
When I do my research and go into people’s cupboards, as I do, and look at what most
of the jeans that they have are, they have may be a pair that they wear on special
occasions (Miller and Woodward 2012; Global Denim Project 2014). I have a pair
of Diesel jeans; and when I want to look good, I wear them. They are expensive.
But mostly I wear supermarket jeans, and I do not think about it, and that is what
most people do. I think it is important to recognize that the reason we wear things is
not necessarily the result of markets or the result of commercial interest or the result
of a desire to create iconicity. There is a failure of every one of those processes.
There may be something materially crucial about the fabric – denim – that it has
become this kind of object in our lives; but really the thing that did that was the
mass population. It was peoples around the world who in a sense forged a relationship.
Consumption Markets & Culture 299

3. As structural anthropologists liked to point out, it is an arbitrary relationship: it did not
have to be cotton, did not have to be blue. It could have been pink: the point is we would
not think twice about it. Still, there are historical reasons why indigo for example has
been important forever.
Indigo basically has been the dominant color for pretty much the entirety of human
history. Indigo was the only dye that did not require what is called a mordant, in other
words, most dyes need another thing to help them fix and have a permanent relationship
as a color. Indigo did not, so when you read your Asterix comics and stories about the
ancient Brits and their Woad, or indeed ancient Native Americans, or ancient Chinese,
the one color you could be pretty sure that people had were variances of indigo. Indigo
was, if you like, the original dye, and it is interesting, even though it is actually now a
chemical. To some extent then, there was that historical continuity, and at the time the
original Levi Strauss jeans were made in California, they were still using real indigo.
That was before the main development of the chemical, the modern chemical, indigo.
Real plant indigo is hugely involved in terms of the history of the world. For
example, I work in the Caribbean. People routinely say, You know, the Caribbean
was colonized by forces in order to have sugar plantations; and they pick places like
Haiti as the epitome of slave plantations that were created as the Caribbean, as part
of the political economy. Haiti was not colonized for sugar – Haiti was colonized
for indigo. Haiti was primarily there, in the world economy, as the producer of indigo.
A lot of the fields of India were planted for indigo. Anthropologist Mike Taussig has
a nice article about the history of indigo, pointing out how much indigo Napoleon
needed for his uniforms (Taussig 2008). That kind of blue has been a huge force in
human history. In a way, there is no necessity, in relation to blue jeans, denim, it
could have been another color; but there is a very nice sense of historical continuity
in the fact that in the ubiquity of modern blue jeans, we are returning to literally a pre-
historic ubiquity. Probably in pre-history indigo would have been as common as it is
now. And that is kind of fun to think about.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
Global Denim Project. 2014. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project
Miller, Daniel and Sophie Woodward. 2012. Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
National Folk Museum of Korea. 2014. “Jeans. Special Exhibition,” October 24, 2014–February
23, 2015. http://nfm.go.kr/language/english/htm/exhi1_special_viw.jsp?keyword=&page=
1&code=60
Taussig, Michael. 2008. “Redeeming Indigo.” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (3): 1–15.
300 D. Miller