INVESTIGADORES
MANZANO Adriana Valeria
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Blue Jean Generation: Dress, Gender, and Youth Identities in Argentina, 1950-1970s
Autor/es:
MANZANO, VALERIA
Lugar:
Chicago
Reunión:
Congreso; 32nd Annual Meeting, Social Science History Association; 2007
Institución organizadora:
Social Science History Association
Resumen:
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 Levis. 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.