Forever in blue jeans: a brief history

I am reading an article by Michael Taussig called ‘Redeeming Indigo’ about the indigo colour or perhaps it’s about the colour indigo. This little history of a colour says so much about the world in which we live.

As he remarks that “To slip into the blue of your blue jeans is to slip into history, not the history of ‘this happened, then that happened’… To slip into the blue of your blue jeans is to slip into a surprising and unexpected encounter with the past – old Cairo in your jeans’ bottom, for instance – but without your having the faintest idea of what you are slipping into”.

The colour blue that is associated with our old blue jeans originally came from the indigo plant and was laboriously extracted at great human and financial cost to serve the interests of the rich colonial world. It was not until 1904 that the colour could be artificially made cheaper than growing it in fields, soaking it, beating it, condensing, drying, etc.

What is incredible about the story of blue is how ubiquitous it has become in our daily world. It is the uniform of the workers with their standard blue overalls, our leisure wear of jeans and shirts, our police uniforms of darker hue and so forth. None of this is accidental. The colour was associated with power and authority, with discipline and order. The naturally occurring blue became such a hallmark of culture stripped from nature by unwilling workers.

It became a fetish of society far removed from the tropical islands that now serve as holiday destinations and sugar plantations, serving another aspect of the global world.

The very denim material of Old Egypt origin was spun out on the looms of an industrialising England in our not so long ago past. What other historical stories are hidden in our pockets, our kitchens and mugs of coffee – the taken for granted forgotten histories of products and things.

So remember that it was not just the exploitation of “… the lives and labour of coloured people the world over to make colours for us – as is so monstrously the case with indigo – but we exploited the magic, the surplus-value, of colour to empower the magic of the commodity-form itself; what Karl Marx came to call the fetishism of commodities — something you might consider next time you slip into the blue of your blue jeans”. (Taussig, 2008).

So much is forgotten and history remains the purview of the elite and the rich. Yet it was the labour of the poor and the resources of the poorer that really drove history. Globalisation is not a new phenomenon. It is just a little more obvious now with the communication technologies.

Africa has so many forgotten histories of global scope embodied in the commodities and things that surround us. I think of this as I drink my Italian coffee of Ethiopian origin, born abroad by East African and Arab traders, mixed with the sugar derived from cane from the Cape Verde Islands …

Reference:
Taussig, Michael (2008) ‘Redeeming Indigo’ Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 25(3): 1–15.