“They were real, they were American”: Jeans in Soviet magazines in the 1970s and 1980s

The 1970s and 1980s saw a significant increase in the popularity of jeans among the Soviet Union's youth. To gain a better understanding of the origins of this trend, the paper analyzes interviews with former Soviet Union citizens, as well as the representation of jeans in print magazines such as Amerika (an American magazine produced for distribution in the Soviet Union), Rabotnitsa (a Soviet magazine for women), and Ogonyok (a general public Soviet magazine). The paper develops a discussion of the ideological and semiological meaning of jeans based on frameworks from the works of Roland Barthes, John Berger, and Karl Marx.