Clothing and Expressive Revolution: Wearing Jeans in Socialism

Abstract

This study investigates jeans use as well as the discursive practices that framed jeans-wearing in 1960s and 1970s socialist Yugoslavia. We adopt a practice theory approach that goes beyond the expressive capacity of jeans and focuses on their material and practical capacity as an epitome of cultural transformation. Practices discussed include embodied practices enabled by jeans and those that have jeans as their target, such as smuggling, dreaming, remaking, appreciation of authentic jeans and rejection of domestic substitutes, emotions about jeans, wearing jeans, and public narratives regarding jeans. We find that the significance of jeans-wearing was created by difficulty of access, the practice of semi-legal smuggling, contact with the West, and the “Italianness” of jeans. Jeans are conceptualized as a key point of connection between material and social transformation and a new structure of feeling, including the intimate experience of the body and its public presentation. We argue that the study of material artifacts as integral to certain practices helps us approach the larger systemic dimensions of (socialist) subjectivity and social transformation against the backdrop of the symbolic boundaries that divided East and West.

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