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By Hugh Mackay
THE mood in the denim trade is turning blue. After 50 years of hawking fashion items to the world, Levi and its myriad copyists are facing a downturn in sales, the closure of stores in America and a halt to their planned One reason is that the fashion for appearing poor, dishevelled and tasteless appears to be giving way, among the young, to something a bit slicker.
(Don't take that as read, by the way: no fashion changes these days are quite as distinct or unidimensional as that.) From America comes the news that the teenage market is even turning its back on Nike: the hot brand in footwear is Hush Puppies.
A few years ago, if you stepped into the lift in an advertising agency, the smartly dressed person standing beside you was probably the lift mechanic. The scruff slouching in the corner in torn jeans, rumpled T-shirt and filthy joggers was probably the agency's creative director, with a Porsche in the carpark to prove it.
But things are changing. Young, up-and-coming creative directors wear ties (well, some do) and the penchant for looking poor, as an expression of urban chic, has given way to a more blatant approach: If you've got it, flaunt it; if you're on the way, dress as if you're already there.
One obvious reason for this shift is easy to explain but painful to contemplate. It was hip to look poor when poverty was not much of a social issue. In the heyday of egalitarianism, when we thought everyone was going to have a slice of the magic pudding, dressing up as, a hobo was an inoffensive joke. Now, there's too much poverty about for the joke to work.
Today, if you dress roughly or cheaply, that's either because you can't afford to be more stylish Qr because you're insensifive to the social chasm that divides the haves from the have-nots. So jeans have lost some of their cachet - here and in the USA - because blue denim, the traditional uniform of the American working poor, is slowly returning to the status of a fabric that means what it says.
But there's another-- generational -- explanation for the fading of jeans' popularity. The baby boomers adopted jeans as the symbol of their determination to be iconoclastic, yet they created the paradox of pants that became an icon themselves - the most ubiquitous item of clothing since the Roman sandal. For boomer men and women, the orthodoxy of jeans wasn't a problem: it suited a generation that was remarkably conformist in its approach to being rebellious.
So, even though young women favor black (rather than blue), they like to wear it in their own individual ways.
There's a third answer to the denim question that might also carry some weight, especially when you see the number of middle-aged baby boomers who are still stuffing themselves into their jeans, even while their offspring are discarding theirs. It's the old story: if mum and dad like it, how could it be right for me? (Coca-Cola, beware: never pitch to the boomers, heavy consumers of your product though they may be. Nothing will repel the teen market like an appeal to their parents.) There comes a timne when even the most relaxed teenagers will baulk at the idea of buying precisely the same fashion item as their parents. Standing next to murn or dad in the jeans store, when you're both buying essentially the same palr of pants, creates a certain uneasiness in the young.
The boomers' nostalgia for the trappings of their own youth is legendary. They have patented the elastic adolescence - stretching all the way into middle age - that makes them the perfect target for Volkswagen's new retro-beefle, Jaguar's new/old S-type and BMW's Z cars. Their nostalgic attachment to jeans almost guaranteed that, sooner or later, the youth market would have to look elsewhere for its own fashion statements.
Jeans have always been heavily symbolic, and it's happening again. If teens and young adults are leaving the field to their parents, that is merely a symbol of some of the more culturally significant ways (like marriage) in which young Australians are declaring they won't be following in their parents' footsteps.
Still, the jeans market isn't dead yet: as baby boomers' waistlines steadily expand, it's going to take more and more denim to accommodate them.
Please mail any comments and suggestions to:
robin_knight@bigfoot.com
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