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Article Excerpt
In 1975, tango poet Hector Negro wrote about "an invasion that began sometime in the 1950s and put an end to an entire lifestyle: at that point, Buenos Aires was dressed in a winter-like fashion, a grey city." In 1975, meanwhile, Buenos Aires looked different because it had become "beautifully blue." (1) Negro illustrated the changing city lifestyles as an invasion of color, where blue replaced grey. The blue of the jeans, to Negro, marked a new lifestyle, developed by young people, that spread to transform the city. This article tells the story of that blue invasion by focusing on the social and cultural life story of a commodity. (2) It reconstructs how, at different stages of its life story, the blue jean was commercialized, who wore it, and the meanings they attributed to the jeans. In addition, it explores the cultural representations of the blue jean and analyzes the debates it sparked in the public arena, which revolved around the "Americanization" of Argentina's culture; the shifting understandings of gender and sexuality; and the changing youth identities the blue jean allegedly embodied.
Scholars who have studied youth of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the United States have often pointed out the importance of dressing practices in the making of youth cultures and subcultures. Scholars have analyzed, for example, the way English mods appropriated of Edwardian suits or the French blousons noire made use of leather items to develop identities and styles, and how these styles were later domesticated, or commodified. (3) Ironically, however, only a few anecdotal accounts have been devoted to unraveling the meanings and uses of the blue jean by youth in the 1960s and 1970s. These studies have also focused on the birthplace of the jean, the United States. (4) Jeans, which pervaded most youth cultures and subcultures, have been taken for granted.
As in most places in the West, the blue jean came to epitomize youth in 1960s and 1970s Argentina. The blue jean helped young people to cementing a sense of generational belonging at the same time that it served to registering the multiple differentiations that crossed by "youth" as a seemingly homogeneous category. As sociologist Fred Davis has asserted, dress acts as a visual metaphor for identity and for noting the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate among and within identities. (5) In 1960s and 1970s Argentina, the blue jean acted as a prime marker of a youth identity as separate and eventually opposed to an "adult" identity and fashion. Indeed, jeans were the first dress item to be worn exclusively by young men and women, who increasingly dressed--and thought, and behaved--differently from the older generation. Yet the blue jean also served to signal and reinforce class distinctions and gender differences among young people. Jean styles, brands, and "nationalities"--whether imports or locally produced--became ways of elaborating intra-generational differences. By the mid 1970s, there was a "blue-jean generation," although young people neither wore the same jeans nor endowed them with the same meanings.
Writing the life story of the blue jean not only involves addressing the making of youth in 1960s and 1970s Argentina but also, in doing so, shedding new light into the transformations of gender and sexuality that youth came to embody. The limited historiography on gender and sexuality in 1960s and 1970s Argentina has so far accounted for the prudent liberalization of sexual mores and practices as well as for the opening of new spaces and expectations for young women, especially from the urban middle classes. (6) In this regard, by looking at the uses and meanings that young people made out of the blue jean, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the transformations in the performances and representations of masculinities, femininities, and eroticism in 1960s and 1970s Argentina, and to disentangle how those transformations intersected with class and political dynamics. I contend that the blue jean became a privileged object through which analyze those transformations in the realm of gender and sexuality, in which not only young people but also a wide spectrum of "adult" actors intervened, including state officers, the media, and the advertising industry.
In the process of "invading" Argentina, the blue jean underwent three life stages. By 1958, the time of its arrival in the country, the blue jean constituted a link in the chain of American goods, including comics and rock music. The advertising and uses of the blue jean were often coded and decoded using its American-ness at their reference point. Argentines soon baptized the blue jean as vaquero (cowboy) and the locally produced brands carried definite American names, such as "Far West." At this initial stage, working-class young men were the vanguard among vaquero consumers. Through the adoption of this new dress item, they constructed and deployed alternative meanings of masculinity, which became the center of the first public controversies that surrounded jeans and those who wore it. Middle-class young men, for their part, wore blue jeans, not vaqueros: they sought out the imported American brands and, in doing so, constructed a way of signaling class and cultural distinctions among boys.
A second life stage of the blue jean in Argentina began in the late 1960s. Both middle- and working-class young women became prime blue-jean consumers. Young women developed new understandings of beauty, which included a profound redefinition of the ideals of feminine desirability. These new ideals soon became the lure of the blue jean as a commodity, since advertisers heavily relied on them to promote either the well-established local or the recently-arrived American brands. During the authoritarian regime led by Gen. Juan Carlos Ongania (1966-1970), however, young women in blue jeans sparked heated public debates. From the mayor of Buenos Aires City to sociologists and psychiatrists, Argentines discussed the supposed "over-sexualization" of public life and the perils of a unisex fashion to the blurring of gender roles. As women became blue-jean consumers, the local market expanded.
By the early 1970s, the blue jean had "invaded" Argentina. The third and final stage of the life story that this article analyzes was characterized by still another shift in the uses young people made of the blue jean. Many members of the "blue-jean generation" actively engaged in radical politics and committed themselves to political militancy in party, student, and neighborhood organizations they contributed to create. Politicized young women and men made of the blue jean the anti-fashion item par excellence, almost a "uniform for struggling." Between 1971 and 1974 almost no sphere of social and cultural life remained untouched by the politicization process, including fashion and the relation between American mass culture and youth consumption.
The Vaqueros are for Young Men
On September 1, 1958, the most widely-read newspaper in Argentina carried a full-page advertisement. All in capitals, in a bold font, the ad announced that "Far West has arrived." The ad stated that the "authentic vaquero" was a "joyful, resistant" item and pedagogically informed its readers that it could be worn "at home, to go to the club, and even to go to work." A drawing of jumping, doubtlessly masculine legs with rolled-up vaqueros dominated the ad, conveying a sense of dynamism and youthfulness. The ad clearly targeted the recently-arrived vaqueros to working- and middle-class young men inasmuch as it emphasized still another trait of the new item: it was cheap. (7) Until the mid 1960s, the Far West brand was crucial to the life story of the blue jeans in Argentina, dubbed "vaqueros." The vaqueros became the center of the initial controversies on youth masculinities and supposed problematic sexuality as well as on the Americanization of Argentina's culture.
Although promoted as an American good and endowed with an obvious American label, the Far West vaqueros were locally produced by the Fabrica Argentina de Alpargatas. One of the largest textile factories in Argentina, the company produced the slipper-like, rustic shoes--alpargatas--worn by rural workers. (8) In the early 1950s, perhaps to emulate the original uses of the blue jean in the United States, Alpargatas began to produce denim fabric in a failed attempt to provide rural workers with pants. (9) A chance to use the denim appeared in the mid 1950s, when a series of American "teen" movies arrived in Argentina and showed the potentials of creating and exploiting a market other than rural workers. In re-launching the denim pants, Alpargatas had the invaluable support of the local representatives of the oldest advertising agency in the United States, John Walter Thompson (JWT). (10) Beginning in 1957, JWT's representatives helped Alpargatas' executives to choose a label with American resonances and to target a new market: young men. (11)
In the late 1950s, working- and middle-class young men's clothing largely replicated their parents' dress code. As in many other western countries, boys experienced a crucial rite of passage to adulthood when they achieved the "right" to wear long pants, preferably suits. Although some progressive psychologists began to advise parents that the rite needed to be re-thought in an era when boys wanted to be adolescents before becoming adults, the tradition persisted. (12) Through the rite of passage, families invested boys with the attributes of a respectable masculinity: sobriety, seriousness, and responsibility--or the cornerstones for building disciplined work habits and responsible family behavior. The new men bought their clothes in the same retail stores their parents did. One of these stores, Casa Munoz, advertised its collections by playing on the words "suit" and "both," which...
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