Blue Jean Generation: Dress, Gender, and Youth Identities in Argentina, 1950-1970s

MANZANO, VALERIA

Chicago

Congreso; 32nd Annual Meeting, Social Science History Association; 2007

Social Science History Association

Two decades ago, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai asserted that “things” have a social life, and encouraged scholars to provide what he called “a cultural biography of things.” In this paper, my purpose is to construct a cultural biography of the blue jean in Argentina, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Since the late 1950s on, a leading Argentine textile factory, Alpargatas, began to address its denim production to the designing of the US-style blue jean. By the mid-1960s, Alpargatas sold one million of its “Far West” blue jean per year. In that boom, the transformations of advertising strategies were instrumental: indeed, a US-based company, John Walter Thompson Advertising Group (JWT), organized Alpargatas’ advertising campaigns and targeted them, specifically, to young people. In so doing, JWT convened rock musicians and, fundamentally, created a series of images that purportedly represented the “new youth.” By working exhaustively on those companies’ archives, I reconstruct both the characteristics of the “Far West” production and sales as well as the advertising campaigns geared to youths. The dissemination of the blue jean among Argentine youths generated heated public debates among those “experts” in youth issues. Certainly, conservative organizations –such as different Catholic leagues- reacted against the use of the blue jean insofar as it supposedly implied the blurring of gender roles. Meanwhile, more liberal and modernizing voices –sociologists, psychologists, and journalists- used the expansion of the blue jean to talk about emerging youth identities, which also implied to talk about gender and sexuality. I reconstruct those debates and their possible meanings by looking at the popular press –where most of them were staged on-, sociologists’ and psychologists’ essays, and the catholic League of Family Mothers’ archives. It is apparent that 1960s and 1970s young people embraced the new fashion, which indeed implied a marker of youth identities. However, even if “all youths only wanted to wear a simple blue jean,” as a rock lyric asserted, they did not want to use “the same” blue-jean brand, or style. There was a sharp, class-based differentiation among blue-jean consumers: those who could only afford to by the Alpargatas-produced “Far West,” and those who could afford the more expensive, and in many ways more culturally valuable, US-imported brands, such as Levi’s. I reconstruct the varied uses, and the varied meanings created around the blue jean by both former working- and middle- class young people. To a large extent, the blue jean allowed to articulate an image and an identity for young people while, at the same time, acted as a prime artifact to differentiate youths according to their social positioning.