Paul Jobling

Professor in Design History
School of Humanities
University of Brighton

Paul Jobling is Professor in Design History in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Among his publications are Fashion Spreads: word and image in fashion photography since 1980 (Berg, 1999); Man Appeal: Advertising, Menswear and Modernism (Berg, 2005); and Advertising Menswear: masculinities and menswear in the British mass media since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Abstract

‘The Jeans that Built America’: music, image and myth in advertising for Lee and Levi’s between 1985 and 1994

Between 1957 and 1969, Roland Barthes produced a body of writing about the codes of fashion, centred on his book Système de la Mode/The Fashion System. At its heart is the thesis that real, everyday clothing is secondary to the ways in which it can be articulated in the rhetoric of fashion editorials and fashion spreads. This talk takes up Barthes’ challenge and examines the dialectic between written clothing and image clothing he evinces to analyse how British television advertising campaigns for jeans since the 1980s signify a timeless myth about the American heritage of such products through the simulacral fusion of past and present. At the same time, the timeless mythology about American industry and masculine heroism is enunciated performatively in these campaigns by way of the musical soundtrack, which replaces the usual advertising jingle, dialogue or voice-over. In his talk, Paul Jobling wants to address, therefore, how their narrative arc also enlists the ‘practical collaboration’ of the reader that Barthes refers to in Image, Music, Text (1977).