Jeans and Fashion

"Fashion provides one of the most ready means through which individuals can make expressive visual statement about their identities" Bennett, A. (2005). Culture and everyday life. London: Sage. P. 96

Fashion now 'does not simply 'trickle down' from the dictates of the self-productised elite' (Craik 1993: ix), but values multiple fashion systems which move on a continuous spiral of modifications. These systems have been significant factors in the construction of social identities and allowing individualism of 'self' to develop through clothing.

This essay seeks to discover the theory of diffusion in context to substantial changes in identity becoming less structured by class's history in relation to social hierarchies. With focus on diffusions main theories, trickle-Down and Bubble-Up, (Veblen, 1899, G. Simmel 1904, and ) particularly later on with its interest to youth culture; analyzing its effects on providing a means for expressing personal identity. This essay intends to analyze the agendas of the elite class, explicitly consuming fashion as a form of control over the subservient groups in society and maintaining dominant positions in authority.

What is interesting is the agendas by which these roles have changed; in view of the demise of such social limitations in postmodernism, having allowed subcultures and youth groups to move towards an expressive means allowing a negotiation of communal restraints. I intend to pursue class, identity and these other elements with particular attention to jeans later on.(cut?) Garments have conflicting meanings, imposed upon by different individuals in comparison to the traditional depiction such as, for example jeans used for working labour class. Nevertheless, in looking at jeans from their privileged beginnings, it can be seen as a garment that explicitly identifies with the wearer. 'Since the dawn of fashion in the west' 'no other article of clothing has in the course of its evolution more fully served as a vehicle for expression of status ambivalences and ambiguities than blue jeans' ( Davis, 1992: 69).