Denim, Metal, Passion Campaign Analysis

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solitary individual comes up again and again, but the Denim, Metal, Passion campaign could be interpreted to show that for the Levi’s jeans wearer all the introspective work is done. The skin replaced by denim, and the authentic figure, literally translucent, has escaped society. In this sense I take Botterrill’s therapeutic commercial to be apparent and visible; it is as if the consumer is coming up for air. As I touch upon later, this metaphor also echoes the Soviet youths yearning to surface from the inertia of Soviet being. The third facet of authenticity is performative: those who engage in an expressive lifestyle can be seen as exemplars of authenticity; those who wear jeans perform originality. In the appendix I have provided a picture …show more content…

The drama of the campaign is well recorded by a Solidarity party political poster, which was posted around Poland in the weeks leading up to the election. The image is a simple still-shot taken from High Noon (1952), a film mentioned earlier, which stars the US film star Gary Cooper (1901-1961), seen on the poster dressed in Sheriff’s attire, and in the colourised versions it is clear that he is wearing jeans. Solidarity won all but one of the seats that they could legally contend in that election. The minimal wording that reads simply “Solidarity,” at the top and “High Noon” at the bottom, indicates the primacy of action over words: High Noon for Poland. Clearly by 1989 Poland and the Eastern Bloc was not only looking west, but to the Wild West, to the frontier. The significant photographic detail, which was changed by the party, was that the Sheriff’s gun was replaced with a ballot paper, an attack on the old regime that supposedly could only be maintained by military power, whilst the new regime was offering a version of law and order that relied solely on popular support and …show more content…

In Poland, a land suffering from inertia of communism, Solidarity had begun to imagine its own US style frontier, and its socio-economic stance is clear, Poland would join modernity, in wake of Locke, Ricardo, Smith and Jefferson, as a nation of individuals with an appetite for property rights and democracy. There is a mordant quality to the image, which mocks social conservatism by replacing the ‘proper’ image with the ‘improper’; the picture would have offended some, and deliberately

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