Blue Jeans vs. Corsets: Examining Relationships with Material Culture

Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward’s work Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary examined a simple, every day item—blue jeans—and discovered just how much one article of “ordinary” clothing is capable of telling us. As the authors explained in the conclusion of their final chapter, the book was broken into three sections. The first several chapters of the book were chiefly descriptive, providing the reader with specific examples of how people in their study relate to their blue jeans, in terms of social relationships, personal history, and their perception of fashion and brands.[1] In the second section of Blue Jeans, Miller and Woodward analyzed the information they provided in the first sections, specifically terms frequently used by participants, and tried to find significance in them.[2] Miller and Woodward used the final section of their work to address the question of theory in anthropology and sociology.[3]

As the authors found, wearers can consider jeans in endless ways: as stability, as signaling a turning point in their life, as helping maintain a certain body image, as conformity, impersonal or generic and a way of blending in, or as a way of staying in fashion, standing out, as comfortable and easy, and more. This book is certainly an intriguing study in material culture, and the author’s conclusion shows that jeans are genuinely transcendent and pose no possibility of inequality.[4] Each way jeans can be considered, and especially their conclusion, caused me to consider the objects we are each studying.

As we worked to identify a larger theme that can be applied to our objects during the exhibit, we returned to the idea of social change, class, and hierarchy numerous times. For most, if not all of our objects, they signified a high status in society or an entrance into high society for their owners. Unlike blue jeans, which can be considered void of all inequalities, our objects existed in part to prove their owners’ high standing in society. 

Another idea that struck me was Miller and Woodward’s point that everyone has a different relationship to jeans. I thought about Emma and her relationship to her wedding corset. For women of Emma's social standing, a corset, like blue jeans today, was every day wear. But because this wedding corset signified an extremely important day in her life and was worn solely for that event, she probably had a more special relationship with this corset than her every day corsets. But, did the women who owned the wedding dresses in our class have different thoughts about their wedding corsets? Did they have different relationships towards their every day corsets? Did some consider them a burden, while others accepted them as socially mandatory? Blue jeans are certainly a unique piece of clothing in that they represent many different things to many different people, and this work caused me to consider the relationship Emma had with her wedding corset in a more serious way.

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[1] Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 152.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid 119.