ABSTRACT
Semioticians would say that the clothes we wear can be seen as 'messages' to others about ourselves. We are always sending messages to others, through our clothing, our body language, our facial expressions and just about everything else we do. Sometimes, psychoanalytic critics would suggest, we don't realize the full extent of the messages about ourselves that we are sending. So blue jeans are full of messages, and decoding these messages for what they reveal about socioeconomic class, attitudes towards authority, and sexuality is not easy. Marxists also have interesting things to say about blue jeans. In his book, Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology & Culture, Wolfgang Haug, a German Marxist, offers some insights into the economic and complicated and contested cultural significance of blue jeans. Wearing jeans began, he says, in youth culture in bourgeois societies but then spread far beyond it, eventually invading socialist countries.
