Blue Jeans Democracy: From A Cultural Perspective

Culture can be defined as a way of life of a people. The ideology of postmodernism that began in the late 1950s and early 1960s breaks the boundary between "low" and "high" culture. And American culture is basically a popular culture. Studying American people’s everyday life is thus of great significance in understanding American culture as a whole. This thesis concentrates on the quintessential American costume blue jeans and investigates into the democratic ideals in blue jeans. Democracy means rule by the people, yet in this thesis it is treated from a cultural perspective as a way of life, which is an affirmation of certain attitudes and values adopted in the day-to-day relationships within the family as well as in society. The purpose of the study is to see how the daily costume that is widely found in American people’s life is affiliated with the features of democracy and regarded as an American icon; and to explore what the blue jeans phenomenon may mean for American culture.After analyzing the features of blue jeans and their development in history, including their roles in various American youth and cultural movements in the 20th centuries, and their relations with other events or phenomena in American society, the thesis argues that the underlying or core ideal of the blue jeans phenomenon is democracy. The blue jeans democracy is based on the decentralization (or devolution) of power, from which more democratic features are naturally ushered in, such as classlessness and equality, freedom and individual diversity. These democratic ideals form the core value of blue jeans, making the pants versatile in different situations and entitling them to the possibility of unlimited meanings.The thesis provides a new way to fully understand American culture and its core values. In comparison with American culture as a whole, blue jeans’democratic ideals are identified amazingly with the core values of America, which is at least partly because of the fact that blue jeans has been evolving in tandem with the nation. This is helpful for us to understand American culture from the perspective of their daily costume, or in a broader sense, from their way of life. And it is also conducive to our thorough understanding of the core value in American society and culture, which is democracy.The study also finds that blue jeans reflect not only the traditional and fundamental values of American society, but also the trend and changes in American popular culture. By analyzing their relations with the ideology of recent postmodernist movement, the thesis proposes that blue jeans, as the uniform of the earlier anti-fashion and counterculture movements, already forecast and paved the way for the emergence of postmodernism. Their democratic ideals correspond precisely to the ideology of postmodernism.Finally, the thesis reveals that the globalization of blue jeans is not merely the one-way Americanization; with mongrel origins blue jeans are designed and manufactured all over the world. But blue jeans remain their democratic ideals and Americanness. They are a globalized American icon and enjoy worldwide popularity. This may suggest that the democratic ideals of blue jeans have been brought to the people of every nation and are universally appealing, but concerning this point, the thesis also raises some questions for future consideration.