Time, Consumption and Everyday Life

Practice, Materiality and Culture

Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781847883650
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Time Management
• Index: Social Sciences

Has material civilization spun out of control, becoming too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet? This book confronts these anxieties and examines the changing rhythms and temporal organization of everyday life. How do people handle hurriedness, burn-out and stress? Are slower forms of consumption viable? This volume brings together international experts from geography, sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. In case studies covering the United States, Asia and Europe, contributors follow routines and rhythms, their emotional and political dynamics and show how they are anchored in material culture and everyday practice. Running themes of the book are questions of coordination and disruption; cycles and seasons; and the interplay between power and freedom, and between material and natural forces. The result is a volume that brings studies of practice, temporality and material culture together to open up a new intellectual agenda.

Section IV The Temporalities of Stuff

10 Buying Time

Daniel Miller

Introduction

One of the most curious aspects of the relationship between time and consumption is the circumstances under which we are able to, in some sense or other, buy time. When the busy rhythms and routines of our contemporary lives are such that we feel we don’t have the time available to actually live out certain things we wish for, and decide instead to buy pre-packed time spent by somebody else, doing this living on our behalf, in the form of a commodity, off the shelf. This chapter examines two examples of this phenomenon of buying time, that of distressed jeans and the trade in antiques and flea markets. These case studies bring out a central paradox of the process of buying time which is the inherent tension between personalization and the impersonal. I conclude by attempting to explain this paradox through reference to Lévi-Strauss’s image of rituals such as rhythms and routines as machines for the suppression of time.

Buying Denim Blue Jeans

Distressed blue jeans are an extraordinary phenomenon. The point about these jeans is that, in effect, someone somewhere is spending their time simulating the wearing out of your clothing, replicating the effect of you spending months or years wearing them. It is as though, on analogy with that common expression ‘get a life’, you could buy a period of your own lifetime off the shelf as represented by these apparently pre-worn jeans. Where once upon a time you had to be involved in heavy labour, or constant wearing, before the jeans reached a certain look, today you can buy all these effects ready-made. Indeed you can simulate life-styles, such as one based in manual work, or a highly adventurous life that might have resulted in these patterns of tearing and fraying, even if you never will or never have lived that kind of life.

It does seem rather bizarre that a textile should be sold as though it had already been worn, almost to death, before we even buy it. That workers in Turkey or Mexico should spend their time simulating these pre-worn effects as an integral part of what is sold to the consumer (on labour in the industry, see Bair and Gereffi 2001; Bair and Peters 2006; Tokatli 2007). Not surprisingly they don’t actually wear these jeans to have this effect. Indeed the paradoxical nature of this process starts to open up as soon as we consider the reaction of a London consumer to the idea that a labourer in Mexico might have actual worked, sweated, ate, danced and lived years wearing this same pair of jeans. The consumer seems to want the illusion of themselves having worn the jeans. They clearly don’t want a consciousness of vicarious wearing of those jeans by an actual other.

Instead industry has developed a wide range of techniques to simulate the effects of jeans having been worn. The very first distressed jeans were sold as stone-washed. The method of washing them with a large pile of pumice stones is still common today, though it is increasingly supplemented by cellulase enzymes, which are natural proteins that may used to obtain a stone-washed look. Apart from stone wash, one can opt for acid wash, moon wash, monkey wash, show wash, white wash and mud wash. Chemicals such as potassium permanganate are applied to shift the tinting. Resins may be used to set creases at particular places in the jeans. There is ozone fading or water jet fading. There are various forms of sandblasting, or handsanding, either on a flat surface or on dummies. Typical special effects including whiskering, that is, crease lines around the crotch, which can be produced with lasers, or by sandblasting, handsanding or abrasive rods. If one wants really fancy results, there are more elaborate methods. For example a laser beam can be passed through a shaped mask that comprises an aperture of the desired shape and is then deflected by a mirror to strike the textile substrate (Denim Academy n.d.; ExpressTextile, 20 March 2003)

One of the main effects that all of these methods are trying to copy is actually a fortuitous result of the nature of denim. Denim is a twill textile in which indigo-dyed warp threads are woven with white weft threads. The warp dominates the surface, which is why jeans appear blue on the outside and mainly white on the inside. As jeans are worn through, the underlying weft threads become more prominent, giving the characteristic worn effect. Clearly other forms of trousers might become well worn, but this would not be as evident because the warp and weft are of the same colour. So blue jeans lend themselves to the conspicuous display of being worn. But this would only account for one element, not the fraying, tearing and embroidering, and would not explain why we would want them to look worn in the first place.

As already noted, we do not wish to imagine an actual labourer wearing these jeans. We probably have no more desire to know about lasers, sandblasting and whiskering the crotch either. The clear preference is for all such processing to take place at some point entirely removed from our consciousness. To be conscious of how these effects were achieved would detract from the illusion that the effects are to be attributed to us, the wearer. This lack of consciousness and distancing from method is most acute when we confront evidence that this idea of other people living their lives for us sometimes becomes literally the case. One of the standard methods of distressing jeans is sandblasting. It is a technique that appears to remain quite common in small unregulated workshops in places such as Istanbul. Recently it has been found that young men who work in these conditions have been contracting silicosis (Akgun et al. 2005; Cimrin et al. 2006). In such cases someone really has given his life so that we are able to purchase our denim jeans with the illusion of spending some of our life in their wearing out. At a more general level, distressing of jeans is associated with high levels of pollution. For example, a report in the Guardian (17 August 2007, p. 25) called ‘Distressed Denim Trend Costs Mexican Farmers the Earth’ tells of the area of Tehuacan in Mexico, a place once famous for natural springs and health water but now heavily polluted.

‘Jeans were born to be used by workers,’ said a local activist, Martin Barrios, ‘now they can cost thousands of dollars and are produced on the backs of exploitation and environmental destruction.’ … Nearby factories were the problem – dozens of them, which are dedicated to doing to jeans in hours what used to take years of wear . . . The clean garments are left ready for sale, while in many factories the chemicals used to treat them are left to flow away in bright indigo waste.

Why is any of this happening? At least until recently, when some other genres of clothes seem to be getting in on the act, there were no other items of clothing that we would find in our retail stores which appear to have been speckled with bleach, torn at the knee, stained with rust, worn out with rubbing, ripped and frayed at several places and subject to a whole series of other destructive processes. If we saw signs of such abuse on any other clothing we possess, let alone intended to buy, we would ourselves become pretty distressed. The nature of the twill helps create the effect but does not of itself explain why jeans, which for a hundred years were sold without distressing, developed this unique other market.

One clue is that distressing goes alongside other forms of transformation. Blue jeans were a garment that at the same time that distressing processes were being developed also become subject to other forms of embroidered embellishments, ranging from sequins to flowers. These effects, too, have been commodified on analogy with distressing. If one goes to the main Levi’s shop in San Francisco, one can order machine-made embroidery, adding sequins and other similar effects simply by conveying the style and form required. But standing in a Levi’s shop in San Francisco, in particular, looking at embroidered flowers is an ideal circumstance to evoke a particular moment in the past, the time of the hippie.

The story can be told personally, in that I was of the generation whose behaviour is being copied by commercial distressing of pre-sold jeans. As a teenager I hitchhiked around rock concerts, wearing flares and flowered shirts (purple and adorned with beads, if you must know). I had blue denim jeans that were worn so much, in such rough conditions, and with so little attention to washing and care that after a while they became naturally abraded and frayed in just the manner that is simulated by commerce today. It was not that there was any fashion in the earliest stages for such extreme abuse of one’s own clothes. The holes, the beer stains, the rips, the fraying, were the natural outcome of a specific life-style, combining lack of money to buy new clothes, independence from home and parental care, a sense of freedom, travel and general hippie personal irresponsibility where one just didn’t care about such things. Stone washing of jeans followed rather naturally from the stoned state of the people who had been wearing them.

Campbell (1987) has noted the considerable significance of the hippie in the evolution of modern consumption. Although in retrospect we appear as of a particular style to which we conformed, for us as participants we believed that the 1960s and 1970s were the vanguard of an unprecedented feeling of personal freedom and experimentation that was a direct repudiation of the conformity of the 1950s and all previous periods. So although the deterioration of my jeans was merely a product of neglect, there was a strong sense that I was free to neglect them, that I didn’t any more have to cut my hair, iron my trousers and reproduce in younger version the image of an older generation. This sense of the individual connected with the other major effect of this wearing through of fabric as it pertained to blue denim jeans. It was not simply that they were worn though, it was that in doing so they became intensely personal. A sense of the personal manifested itself in various ways. One is the quality of cotton to become extremely soft and comfortable after intense wearing. Another is that the jeans were wearing themselves to a very particular body – that they seemed over time to mould themselves to the way one walked, and lay down and carried oneself in the world. I can recall first learning about manufacturers suggesting that the first thing you should do when you purchased their jeans was to take a bath while still wearing them. This ideal of a shrink-to-fit processes enacted by the consumer was the intermediary stage before the development of commercial distressing. This individuality of fit was accentuated by the subsequent long periods of wearing, as you felt the creases, the pattern of wear, related to you as the specific wearer of the specific pair of jeans.

So denim jeans became the most personal, the most intimate item of clothing that anyone had yet experienced. The degree to which this could be the case was wonderfully exemplified in Hauser’s paper (2004) on how the FBI could solve a robbery by identifying an individual through focusing upon the identifiable pattern of that person’s interaction with a specific pair of denim jeans. Denim can also become a kind of embodied record of the particular movements and contours of the particular body, as noted by Candy (2005) using visual interviews and photography to locate characteristic patterns of wearing denim. Today there is a new equivalent to this sense of the self and the body in the growing (shrinking?) phenomenon of women and their skinny jeans. Many women have in their wardrobe the memento of the thinnest that their body ever became, as judged by the jeans size they were able to wear at that time. This image, popularized in an episode of Sex and the City, was found ethnographically by both myself and Sophie Woodward in our respective researches in London.

This personal relationship to jeans is clearly what commerce has attempted to replicate and then pre-empt through the phenomenon of distressing. Even if this is starting to spread to a few other garments, it clearly developed as a direct response to this unique relationship to denim. But this leads to a clear contradiction. My jeans were personal to my body because of the degree of time they spent on my body. Commercially distressed jeans are an artificial simulation of that process. Yes, you can probably artificially induce some of the softness that comes from constant wear, but not the way the jeans mould themselves to you in particular. Indeed the very sense of the commercial faking of this process seems to mitigate against the sense of the personal.

To understand what is going on, we need to situate the whole phenomenon of distressing within a wider appreciation of the special nature of blue denim jeans – a task which was recently undertaken by myself and Woodward in a paper we called ‘A Manifesto for the Study of Denim’ (Miller and Woodward 2007). This provides the academic argument for a larger Global Denim Project (www.ucl.ac.uk/global-denim-project). The paper argues for a consideration of distressing in the context or two other unique properties of denim. The first is the sheer global ubiquity. It is equally extraordinary that at a time when there is increasing choice in a post-fordist, competitive market that we should see something increasingly approaching half the world choosing only one particular textile to wear on their lower half, at any given time. This amounts almost to a global refusal of the dictates of fashion and capitalism, since although there are designer jeans, mostly it is a preference for the mundane and non-descript that dominates jean wearing. Secondly there is Woodward’s work on women getting dressed in the morning in England (Woodward 2007), which shows that denim acts as a kind of foundational bedrock to the typical wardrobe. Woodward notes that very commonly women will start by trying one or two more adventurous items of clothing, and then find they don’t have the confidence to select them on that particular day, and withdraw to the security of denim wearing. This in turn relates to a paper published in Fashion Theory by myself and Alison Clarke (Clarke and Miller 2002) which argues that it is this point of anxiety that should be central to the study of fashion, not the study of the industry.

So we have three extraordinary aspects of denim blue jeans, and it would be unreasonable to see them as merely coincidently in juxtaposition within this single garment. It is not just that denim turns out to have the capacity to be the most individualized and personal garment, but that it is simultaneously the exact opposite – the most global, ubiquitous and in effect anonymous garment that we possess. In short it manages within itself to encapsulate that well-worn phrase about the most local and the most global, and also to somehow address the core of the anxiety that exists in that relationship. Our manifesto paper argues that denim jeans are therefore one of the most profound forms of contemporary clothing, telling us a great deal about that same modernity that is the context for much of our more general discussion over the rhythms and routines of consumption. The degree to which distressed jeans matter is also evident in the strong feelings people have about them. Since June 2007, Woodward and I have been carrying out an ethnography of denim jeans consumption in three streets in North London. Already we have found that when people are talking about their jeans consumption, many consumers, especially older consumers, are adamant about the degree to which they would never, under any circumstances, wear distressed jeans, and have equally strong feelings about the circumstances under which other people also should not wear them, for example, at work.

The implication, as argued in our manifesto paper, is an evident need to acknowledge and account for denim jeans more in the tradition of a philosophy of practice than merely just as an item of apparel. There are many key philosophical issues raised, but for the purposes of a specific focus upon rhythms and routines of consumption the strongest conclusion from this discussion is the direct relationship between buying time, on the one hand, and then the establishment of an extreme polarity between personalization and impersonalization, on the other. If the key to distressing is the way it simulates the long-term personalization of jeans, as a means to negate the impersonality represented by denim’s global ubiquity and homogenization, how is it that this can be achieved through a commercial, industrial and thoroughly anonymous process as represented by industrial distressing and with respect to the most anonymous and homogenizing garment we possess? Denim jeans possess an apparently oxymoronic quality linking the extremely personal and the extremely impersonal. When buying time, which of these are we buying into?

Buying the Patina of the Past

At this point I want to take this paradox back into the frame of anthropological reasoning by examining it in more general and comparative terms, starting with an entirely different socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section I: Time, Space and Practice
• Section II: Pace and Scale: Temporal Order and Disruption
• Section III: Rhythms, Patterns and Temporal Cycles of Consumption
• Section IV: The Temporalities of Stuff
• Index