[1]

“His thick flannel shirt, dark jeans and battered pair of boat shoes suggested that after finishing his coffee, he might just head out to the wood-shop to continue planing his sailboat or check on those miter joints he just glued into the cabinets he’d been detailing earlier in the day.

I’d wager that he did none of those things (who can resist an afternoon in the used bookstore followed by a nice uttapmam, after all?), but the prevalence of mid-century, working-class duds among the stylish set is indisputable.

Not only have classic American clothes, including Pendleton shirts, Red Wing boots and Woolrich outdoor gear - all made in America, as it happens - come back into vogue, but newer, far more fashion-forward companies have also looked to the garb of mill workers, lumberjacks and carpenters for inspiration.

Several currents seem to be informing this trend, the sorry state of the economy being foremost. Humble as it is, I see work wear as having a strong aspirational quality. Like the couple-seasons-in-vogue for all things ’60s and skinny, work wear harks back to an era of American abundance. Though far less fussy than the just-so tie clips and oiled hair of the dapper Dons on “Mad Men,” work wear alludes to the same period, one when a man could work - and dress like he worked - in a factory (seen one of those lately?) and still afford a house, a car and proper vacation each year. More broadly, work wear suggests work, which has become scarce in many parts of the country.

This trend also evokes production craft and industry: our grandfathers burning a pile of leaves on the weekends, hauling a load to the dump, heading to the garage to putter on the Packard. Hardly the stuff of preening metrosexuals, these are clothes for men unafraid to roll up their chambray sleeves, we are to believe, even if those chambray sleeves set them back $200.” [A]

[2,3]

“This dualism of town and country often involved romanticizing the latter. The arcadian tendency to do this, as opposed to romanticizing wilderness, stretches back beyond the Romantic period, as noted (Introduction; Short 1991). Williams (1975, 9) observes:

In the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, simple virtue. In the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition: on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between city and country, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

From time to time in history one aspect of this dualism surfaces while the other becomes relatively dormant, but the two strands are always there, in fundamental tension. Williams shows us that there is a powerful Western tendency to associate the country’s more benign image with the past: a past where things were invariably better than they are now.” [B]

[4]

[5]

“There is, of course, a real danger of romanticizing the working-class communities of the past. It is very easy to slide into an idealized nostalgia for the past, especially among those who were brought up in a traditional working-class environment but who have now become middle-class. It is easy to forget the horrors and conflicts that existed in working-class communities, their conservatism, their xenophobia, their sexism in which so many women were imprisoned.” [E]

[6]

[7]

“Labour imprints itself on this fabric in another way. Denim was once the stuff of work clothes. But what is work? Work is transformation, or specifically, historical action upon nature or nature transformed. As such work marks itself on the jeans. Their particular unevenness, operation in conjunction with the body that is dressed them, makes ‘to wear’ and active verb again. The jeans record the wear and tear of movement, of usage, of a use-value that can be consumed and exhausted eventually by someone who marks a specific selfhood on the item. This marking is not, though, on a passive receiving material, but a material that is, in turn, assertive.

[…] History and labour imprint on matter, and matter asserts its own part in the process, its particular propensity to bend or resist, to be rubbed or rub in turn, dependent on the quirks introduced by the labour process. Forcing their own effectiveness to the fore, labour and matter conspire to speak back against the fetishizing socioeconomic push towards invisibility. In such a process of concealment, as Adorno notes, in an echo of Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, commodification acts to confect an appearance of the never-made, by repressing all traces of labour. ‘[A] consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object, in so far as the labour stored up in it comes to seem supernatural and sacred at the very moment when it can no longer be recognized as labor’ (Benjamin 1999: 669).

Here though, in the jeans that make up Hauser’s evidence, there is the shock recognition of human activity and material substance. Ideal forms are besmirched. With the jeans the flaws reveal: the layers of dyes that rub off under friction, fading tints, the anomalies of stitching, the scuffing of pavement at the heel, the force of the leg asserting its shape.

To generalize from this: is there something here that hits against fashion and its inextricable linkage with modernity? The complex fashion/modernity frequently implies presentness not pastness, consumption not production, expenditure not labour. Is a trend bucked here? For is not everything in modernity’s and fashion’s purview always to be thought of as new and ever-same, that is constant in itself and only ever at the beginning of its (shelf-)life — once passe, then it passes into another state?

[…] Jeans are, then, simultaneously the ultimate modern fashion item and not modern, outside of fashion, because they are more a document of the past. They are documents of the past because they retain on them a record of the past (which perhaps includes their own generic past as work wear) and a chronicle of the interaction between wearer and worn, as well as the trace of labour, the actuality that subtends the fetish. […] To focus on the history, labour and activity ensnared in the material exposes the social guilt of a society, where commodity fetishism typically refuses labour any articulation or voice. But it also, in this case, under these social conditions, allows the discipliners and surveillers another means to ascribe guilt and to act with the force of law upon that.” [C]

[8,9]

[10]

“Rent a flat above a shop/ cut your hair and get a job/ Smoke some fags and play some pool/ pretend you never went to school/ But still you’ll never get it right/ cos when you’re laid in bed at night/ watching roaches climb the wall/ if you call your Dad he could stop it all

You’ll never live like common people/ you’ll never do what common people do/ you’ll never fail like common people/ you’ll never watch your life slide out of view/ and dance and drink and screw/ because there’s nothing else to do” [D]

IMAGES ONE, SIX AND TEN VIA THESELBY; IMAGES TWO, THREE, EIGHT AND NINE VIA NOTHINGISNEW AND BLACKBUTTERFLY, FOUND VIA THENOMADICSUN; IMAGES FOUR AND FIVE VIA HOLLISTERHOVEY; IMAGE SEVEN VIA ACONTINUOUSLEAN.

TEXT TAKEN FROM “POCKET SQUARE: IT’S POSSIBLE TO LOOK LIKE YOU WORK HARD FOR A LIVING, NO LABOR REQUIRED” BY AARON BRITT [A]; “MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM: AN INTRODUCTION” BY DAVID PEPPER [B]; ESTHER LESLIE’S RESPONSE TO “THE FINGERPRINT OF THE SECOND SKIN” BY KITTY HAUSER, FROM “FASHION AND MODERNITY” [C]; LYRICS TO “COMMON PEOPLE” BY PULP [D]; “THE CHALLENGE FOR THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL: CULTURE, CURRICULUM, AND COMMUNITY” BY DAVID H. HARGREAVES