Summer totems: freedom, equality, jeans

22/12/2022 By acomputer 338 Views

Summer totems: freedom, equality, jeans

A simple blue canvas, and the world was dressed! From the incarnation of youth to the logo race, a look back at a fashion revolution.

By
Guillaume Erner

From the 1960s, fashion became a three-piece act, jeans, T-shirt and sneakers. And the 21st century, so far, has focused on deepening this triptych. As usual, this revolution began with a revolt. Because jeans are above all a “no” to formal – the classic wardrobe, tailored or suit. Putting on jeans is like taking a sartorial ditch, wanting to put an end to the arbitrariness of shapes that are far removed from their functions. What are traditional clothes for, if not to constrain bodies to keep the social body in place? This is why the choice of jeans covers an unprecedented social upheaval, that of the 1960s. More than an evolution, an anthropological revolution. This means that during this strange decade everything was modified, the relationships between beings, the meaning and the very conception of existence. An earthquake embodied by denim, which appeared about a century earlier and imported to California from Nîmes – as its name suggests – by a Bavarian Jewish immigrant, a certain Mr. Levi Strauss. A canvas resistant to everything, which was to allow everything to be done with a single pair of pants, a total canvas dedicated to dressing the entire planet.

Pants acclaimed by young people

Just as France brought the world sans-culottes, California brought it jeans. The story has been told many times, but the Beach Boys sum it up best, "a new place where the kids are hip" is born, and this "new place" stretches from Los Angeles to San Francisco . On the cover of the single "I Get Around" (1963), the group ditched the costume for ultra-bleached jeans, probably better suited to après-surf. Like everything that has upset society until today, from recreational drug use to microcomputers, jeans were born there, as sociologist Edgar Morin notes in his “California Journal”. France could have stayed away from this phenomenon. It was because he was opposed to this notion that was so complicated to render in a language other than ours: etiquette. However, she succeeded in her transition from the drawbridge to Levi's, and from Versailles to Versace: the youth acclaimed these pants which intended to erase social differences. Blue jeans also became the color of a new social group, that of young people. Biology had always known youth, society had bypassed it for millennia. For the first time in the history of humanity there appeared an age in life when the child did not immediately give way to the adult, when one did not yet leave one's family to eventually found one of one's own. . It was this age that made this garment its uniform and thus decided to distinguish itself from the rest of society, without its members distinguishing themselves from each other. Like every social group, the youth had its media and its opinion leaders; from “Salut les buddies”, the newspaper of a generation, to Johnny Hallyday, jeans became essential throughout France. When Edgar Morin analyzes the modernization of the country, he notes, for example, the way in which it spreads throughout the territory, starting from the large Breton cities to reach the small towns. The appearance of “young people” changed everything in society, of course, and first of all in the world of fashion. A religion was born, youthism, which imposed its tendencies, necessarily cruel since supposed to emphasize the grace of young bodies. The "role models", who were not yet called influencers, also changed, they could be singers, sportsmen, writers, whatever they were young and wearing denim.