Indigo Bodies : Fashion, Mirror Work and Sexual Identity in Milan

This paper explores the everyday sexualisation of the body through a focus on clothing practices, with reference to Denim Jeans. Despite their codification as potentially sexy, Jeans remain a mundane, almost ubiquitous item, perceived as remarkably versatile for all practical purposes in ordinary life. They are subject to fashion dynamics, and indeed represent an important segment in the fashion industry. They thus provide an excellent spot for the exploration of sexualization as an ordinary practice that emerges from normal daily rounds, as much as it is performed in specialized places or choreographed in a myriad of glamorized symbolic forms. Based on ethnographic interviews conducted with youths from Milan in their bedrooms, the paper considers how Denim’s relationship to fashion illuminates the constitution of embodied subjectivity vis à vis clothing. Instead of developing a semiotic approach by considering how the fashion system plunders fetishism or sexual subcultures for inspiration, I concentrate on how the expression of sexuality is mediated by Denim Jeans, situating their position in the actualization of clothing practices in everyday life. In other terms, I start naturalistically from reported practices of meaningful ordinary use of an ordinary item such as Jeans, interrogating the chains of meanings which link identity, embodiment and sexuality. The mediating role of Denim is revealed as subjects perform what I define as “mirror work” to negotiate their own body perception in relation to normative ideals of beauty and sexuality. Denim Jeans afford a perception adequacy or ‘fitness’, which articulates comfort with compliance as well as authenticity with adaptability. The paper closes by pointing to normativity, showing that feeling fit is crucial to feeling sexy, something which is articulated via gendered notions of seduction.