Blue Jeans

I recently read that Levi Strauss will suspend selling in Russia, adding to the sanctions being imposed over the war in Ukraine.

Restricting blue jeans in Russia doesn't seem like much of a thing compared to oil production or banking or freezing oligarch's assets. But blue jeans matter to Russia in a way that is hard to imagine.

Fifty three years ago (53!) at the age of 19, I went to the Soviet Union for two months. It was with a study group from the University of Pittsburgh, and it was sanctioned and chaperoned and allowed in the Brezhnev era. Even so, what was my mother thinking? A naive, very immature teenager going to Cold War era Soviet lands in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War? Really?

A Ukrainian wooden dish and Russian rubles saved from 1969

It was the late 60s. I spoke enough Russian from my language studies to get by (I have lost any Russian facility all these years later, except I can spell out words and suss out a few phrases). 

We went to Kiev as the spelling was then anglicized, and to Moscow. But we stayed and studied in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. It was an incredible experience in so many ways, and reading my tightly penned postcards home, marveling at the US moon landing from Soviet Russia while complaining about a sore throat and exams . . . what a memory trip.

A post card home

One of the things I remember vividly, among so many other impressions of that trip, was the Soviet's lust for blue jeans. Levi 501s were prized, but any would do. They could not buy them in the 1960s, but they had seen them on bootleg rock tapes and anything western that you could wear and display was desired. Jeans were what would make a young Soviet look cool. There was a black market for jeans that even naive US student tourists knew about.

We were repeatedly accosted on the street and offered a lot of money to buy the jeans off our bodies. I didn't sell mine (I had packed light and had none to spare) but I easily could have. It happened every day we went out.  джинсы -- jeans!!

Of course that was 53 years ago. The Soviet Union is long gone, Russia has opened to all sorts of western goods and Russian models hawk western fashion, not only blue jeans but every new vogue.

Soviet kopeks I saved

The article I read about sanctions struck me. When denim jeans had never been seen covering a Soviet butt they were highly coveted. But the loss of them would not have mattered, they never had those goods in the 1960s. They were just aspirational. Just dreams.

Now, though, every Russian wears them and every older Russian remembers getting their first pair. When Levi's cuts sales the economic impact will be one thing, but the hit to the identity of a Russian who grew up lusting after Levi 501s will be incomparable. 

It's hard to imagine what will end this terrible war, but as hard as the future is to see, this sanction could matter beyond the economic hit.