Blue jeans

[ladyofastolat]

On this week's list of new books, there was a book that claimed in its blurb that at any one moment in time, half the world's population is wearing blue jeans. I am therefore inspired to do a poll.



[Poll #1654277]

Comments

[rubygirl29.livejournal.com]

The only reason I'm not wearing jeans right now is because I'm in my professional work wardrobe. Other than that, I'm a blue jean baby. :-)

[tavabean.livejournal.com]

When I'm not in uniform, I'm in jeans. Although I admit quite a few are not blue.

[purplecat]

I find jeans uncomfortable, I'm endlessly surprised that they're so popular.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Me too. Are we doing something wrong?

[segh.livejournal.com]

Well, if you are I am too. I had a pair when I was eleven, I think, but have never worn them since.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I also have red, brown, olive green and dark green jeans, which I bought to test the hypothesis that the ban on jeans at work (entirely unreasonable for someone whose work involves ladders and lots of dust) applies only to blue jeans. So far I seem to be correct, as I wear the coloured ones most weeks.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

I have grey and navy jeans as well as three pairs of blue ones.

Blue ones = respectable pair - wear out and about
less respectable pair - wear at home
tatty pair - wear for housework, gardening etc

[torkell]

No, because I'm still wearing the trousers/shirt I wore at work having gotten in a few minutes ago and sat down to trundle through LJ.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Haven't worn jeans since I was old enough to decide what I wore.

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

I know I have two pairs of green jeans, and one pair of dark reddish purple ones. It's the potential for a pair of blue jeans to be lurking in the back of a wardrobe, too, that makes this difficult.

[sally_maria]

When I was a student, I lived in them, but these days I have a lot of other trousers that I am equally likely to be wearing.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

How about: I am wearing my favourite blue denim skirt.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Most of my jeans are grey or black or tan. I used to always have green ones, but green ones went out and you couldn't get them.

I do, or did, have a blue pair, but they didn't fit very well and I never felt comfortable in them. Which is odd, because normally I wear loads of blue. Not sure if that blue pair is still lurking somewhere or if I recycled them.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

(random commenting on old posts, hey!) I remember one of your pairs of green jeans, which was increasingly held together by colourful embroidery :-)

I have one pair of light green jeans, but I'd like dark green ones. Or purple - purple would be great.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

I wear jeans most days to walk the dog - since they're about the only things I own that are muddy-paw-proof, ranging in colour from black to pale blue. Today's pair were navy - do they count?

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Most, and possibly all, of the jeans I've owned in the last decade have been black.

But the book's assertion strikes me as unlikely for other reasons. Given that (as a rule) about a third of the world's population will be asleep at any given time, and an unknown additional proportion will be showering, swimming, being put into an MRI scanner, or performing some other activity for which jeans are totally unsuited, saying that half of all people are wearing blue jeans at any given time is equivalent to asserting that the vast majority of people (an absolute minimum of three quarters, allowing for 1/3 sleepers but nothing else) wear blue jeans at all times when awake. This strikes me as being unlikely even in WEIRD countries, and much more so in the rest of the world. Sorry, am I taking this too seriously? ;-)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Oops. I just rechecked the blurb, and it actually says that on any one day, almost half the world's population will be wearing jeans, so I guess that excludes people who are asleep. It still seems incredibly high, though. It looks like an interesting book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Denim-Daniel-Miller/dp/1847886310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291758583&sr=8-1), though. I'm intrigued to wonder what anthropologists have to say about heans. Shame I won't be buying it for the library...

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Presumably what they mean is that on any given day 50% of people will wear blue jeans at some point (which still isn't quite what they've said). That's certainly rather better; I might even be able to believe it for some (mostly WEIRD) countries, but I'm still deeply sceptical that it applies to the world as a whole. (Note, for example, that there are hundreds of millions of peasant farmers in China and India alone for whom jeans are likely to be unaffordably pricey, never mind Africa, the rest of Asia, or those places where jeans are culturally unacceptable for whatever reason.)

It still might be a very interesting book, though, provided that the contents are rather more thoughtful than the blurb. (Which is entirely possible, as any author who's had a furious argument with their publisher about the drivel put on their book covers can confirm:)

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Having followed the Amazon link and had a 'look inside', I note that

a) the authors do go so far as to allow that "[...]discounting the major populations of rural South Asia and China, perhaps the majority of people in the majority of countries[...]", which is to say that they think that half of the people in half of the countries that amount to half of the world's population might wear jeans on any given day. I make that about 1/8th, which I find much more believable. And even then, they say "perhaps".

b) a couple of pages later, they're happily stating that "American citizens are the lowest spenders on denim, [with] 76% only prepared to pay up to US$40 for a pair of jeans". If you can afford to pay USD40 for a pair of trousers, you're extremely well-off by international standards, which suggests that their data may be somewhat biased even when you allow for the assumption in (a).

[evilmissbecky.livejournal.com]

I am in jeans right now because I'm allowed to wear them at my job, and thus I haven't bothered to change when I got home. There is very little difference these days between my "work clothes" and my regular clothes. :-)

[squonk79.livejournal.com]

I am wearing (dark) blue jeans at the moment. Although mine is an "office" job, I spend quite a bit of time crawling in small, dirty access spaces behind the interactives in the museum so i'm not going to wear proper "office" clothes.

I put that i'm equally as likely to wear something other than jeans in my leisure time. That's because if i'm in the house, i'm wearing pyjamas. :D

[chainmailmaiden]

My standard non work wear is jeans, but I tend to wear black jeans about half the time. I've owned green and brown ones in the past, though it seems to be more difficult to get coloured jeans now. I must stock up the next time they are back in fashion :-)

I used to wear jeans at work, but now my job is a bit more proper, I feel more of a need to impress by the way I dress. This is a terrible trial for me as I hate having to bother about looking smart and I rarely manage to look smart for more than about 5 minutes after getting dressed. I think I'm one of nature's natural scruffs, which is why jeans are so appealing :-D