A Garment in the Dock; or, How the FBI Illuminated the Prehistory of A Pair of Denim Jeans (Winner of the Journal of Material Culture Alfred Gell essay competition 2004)

Bibliographic Data

ID2390852
AuthorsKitty Hauser (Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, UK, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume9
Issue3
Pages293-313
Publication date2004-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183504046895
OpenAlexW1714681000
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited10

This article looks at research carried out at the FBI Laboratory's Special Photographic Unit in the identification of denim trousers from bank surveillance film. This research, which was published in 1998, showed that despite the ubiquity of jeans, each pair has individual identifying characteristics caused by the manufacturing process and by wear, and that these might be used as evidence in the identification of criminal suspects. What the FBI research also inadvertently illuminated was an otherwise hidden relationship between garment, maker and wearer, in an effective - if accidental - reversal of commodity fetishism

Accidental · Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Business · Clothing · Commodity · Competition (biology · Criminology · Denim · Fetishism · Identification (biology · Political science · Prehistory · Sociology · Anthropology · Art History and Market Analysis · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · History · Law

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