jeans and tattoos

We see the tribal armband tattoo everywhere. Obviously some individuals in society have domesticated this cultural sign. Others sport the Chinese symbol tattoos or maybe ‘authentic’ ancient Japanese clothing. At a certain point this domestication prompted mockery. I can’t really see people with tribal tattoos or Chinese symbols without smiling. So, as we talked about in class, we deal with the Other by mockery or domestication, and in the form of the tribal armband tattoo, both (at least in my opinion).
Another idea we discussed was how countercultures act as floating signifiers but become fixed when they are commodified. When I hear this I immediately think of my life with jeans. I grew up with two brothers and two neighborhood boys, so I didn’t really care about fashion. My mom came home with these flare jeans (this was back when flare had its comeback), which I refused to wear, I only liked straight. Anyways, this whole new wave of flare jeans, kind of erased the bohemian aesthetic and hippie culture relating to them. Their commodification froze the flare jean message attached to peace and freedom. They were just a part of everyday culture. They lost their entire basis of ‘being’.
A year or so after this I started listening to The Strokes and Kings of Leon. Both bands wear extremely tight tapered jeans (KOL has song – tapered jean girl), so I instantly subscribed to this fashion. Of course it was terribly hard to find tapered jeans. However, after a few years when models/celebrities started also wearing these jeans, it caught on. The jean was commodified and everyone walks around in them today. I Othered myself in high school with these jeans and then suddenly they were everywhere. The original sentiment of ‘cool’ I felt from them (with attachment to the music scene) was diminished. Although they are now easy to find, they lose the initial appeal they had to me. They are no longer the beloved outsider hip jean, but the embraced commodified one. They became normalized, embraced, and redefined.


Kelsey. 11/4.