We’re all savvy these days. We all know our signs and signifiers, that blue jeans aren’t just blue jeans. Above all garments, they are within each of our grasps, yet continue to represent the most potent aspects of street fashion and sub-cultural style: aspiration, fantasy and drama.

Democratic yet so detailed as to simultaneously appeal to elitist instincts, jeans deliver authenticity, that most alluring of all qualities inherent in objects of sartorial desire.

As embodied by the Levi Strauss 501 - an unimpeachable glory of design and content manufactured in San Francisco from hardy cotton twill from France (de Nmes) for cowboys, gold-rush prospectors, farmhands and railroad workers in the 1860s - denim looks and feels mighty real.

When I put together my book The Look - an investigation into the combustion which occurs when great music meets fantastic visual style - and followed the twisted trail which wound from the utility-wear sold in 1946 by Elvis’s tailors Lansky Bros in Memphis to today’s multi-national, multi-billion and monstrous denim label frenzy, I discovered denim, and in particular blue jeans, at every turn.

The beauty of blue jeans lies as much in the story behind their arrival in the arsenal of popular taste, for it was unplanned, as organic as the fabric from which they are made. I was enlightened to this by the late Malcolm McLaren. As well as being the greatest cultural iconoclast of his generation, he was alsoan astute and educated fashion historian.

For it was at McLaren’s early 70s shop Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road that I first encountered jeans presented not as fashion items but as fetishised totems: the straight-legged Levis were neatly arraigned in single pairs, stiff as boards, the Selvedge seams on display and cards carrying washing instructions proudly foregrounded.

“Look at what the beats, people like Jack Kerouac, were wearing after they left the marines and the army and went on the road,” McLaren advised me long ago. “Blue jeans, white t-shirt, leather jacket. When Hollywood looked around for rebellious images which would suit stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean, they settled on that look. And when kids in Britain saw it up on the big screen, they wanted it to.”

For many years – decades – big business did not understand denim’s desirability, so could not co-opt it. Far from the mainstream in the 50s, Britain’s first menswear boutique, the subterranean Vince Man’s Shop in Soho, sold some of the first home-made denim in light-blue shades to its largely gay clientele (Sean Connery, then a wannabe actor muscleman, posed in a pair in magazine ads) and Marc Bolan, then Mark Feld and one of the UK’s first mods of the early 60s, used to reminisce how there was just one shop in the whole of London – a surplus store in Leman Street, Whitechapel - which stocked original Levi’s originally intended for US service camps around the UK.

“One day we turned up on 40 scooters and stole the lot,” said Marc during his 70s glam heyday. “They were there, one wanted them so one took them. My scooter zipped off without me so I stuck a couple of pairs up my jumper, ran down the road and jumped a bus. My heart was pounding; it was great knowing we were the only ones among a few people in England who had them. That was very funky.”

It was also smart: Modernists such as Bolan prided themselves on The Who manager Pete Meaden’s standard line for his peers: “Clean living through difficult circumstances.” Conversely the art-school graduates who powered the beat boom and British music – the Stones, the Pretty Things, The Kinks – incorporated denims into the scruffy, blues-associating coffee-bar look of Chelsea boots, matelot shirts and pea-coats. That way they could identify with the founding fathers of black music such as Leadbelly, who had been forced to wear denim during his years on the Texas chain gang. One of these young Brits, Peter Golding – who later invented stretch denim in the 70s – even moved to the Beat Hotel in Paris. “I busked on the boulevards and understood the relationship between railroad blues and dungarees,” he once told me.

In the years after the beats, art students and mods, denim was embraced by rockers, Hell’s Angels, skinheads, punks, rockabillies, casuals, hip-hop crews...hell, at the height of Baggy, acid-housers and Cheesy Quavers donned dungarees as the ultimate ant-fashion statement. And in doing so, naturally, effortlessly, in their very British way, they made a fashion statement.

It is here, down the years and in this diversity, that the seriously significant element of any enduring garment comes into play: mutability. At every price point, in different silhouettes and shades, with every conceivable elaboration and variation of detail, denim has multiplied, proliferated and survived.

And so today we crave Fennica x Orslow’s stunning adherence to traditional values and appreciate the recasting of this staple in a contemporary context by the likes of Christopher Shannon[below]and Martine Rose[above].

Denim’s ability to withstand renewed waves of invention, nuance and flair is evident at Pokit, the Wardour Street shop situated just a few hundred yards from where Vince Man Shop traded in flamboyant “Continental-wear” jeans in the 50s.

Pokit’s Seven Foot Cowboy range is the result of Bayode Oduwole’s investigations into the styles worn by rodeo riders down the decades: “We wanted to look at the larger than life characters of the west, the melting pot who made America and the world what it is today,” he says, using an example the side-buttoning Crazyhorse, which have a yoke inspired by those on the seat of Hussar Guard’s britches while the high-waisted shape utilises the roomy design for jeans worn by rodeo clowns, who need maximum mobility to perform their stunts safely.

As worn by Dexys leader Kevin Rowland on the cover to last year’s stand-out album One Day I’m Gonna Fly, the Crazyhorse represents all that is great about denim jeans. I ask you, which other garment could contain circus and military references so comfortably? And which continues to exude toughness and cool in equal measure?

Artist Jack Brindley with curator Tim Dixon are 'Open File'. The curatorial duo present a line-up of new and established artists at the ICA in the first of a triptych of performances and screenings. The events reflect what it is to curate in an increasingly virtual age and in a time where 'digitalization and the virtualisation of space implies a crucial shift where the human scale of industry and society have disappeared, and therefore social products are no longer manipulated totally materially'. Linking the argument to the human body, evolution of human interaction, design and object function, 'Long Live the New Flesh' poses questions about the boundaries and confluence between body and technology. Benedict Drew and John Gerrard feature in the one off event that brings together emerging and established practitioners in an evening of live bodies and digital image.

Here David Burrows from collective Plastique Fantastique answers some questions on 'the new flesh' and their performance that will 'summon the Neuropatheme'...

Dazed Digital: 
Are there any references that specifically tie in?
David Burrows: Texts, YouTube films, references include the ideas of Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher who has been working with neuroscientists and who wrote the ‘Ego Tunnel’. Metzinger argues thatno one has ever been a selfand suggests that this concept and the counter-intuitive discoveries of neuroscience will be difficult for people to accept but that the technologies produced as a result of these discoveries will effect everyday life and culture. As well as this we have been thinking about Norbert Weiner and his ideas about feedback loops, Scot Bakker’s novelNeuropathand other writing, Ray Brassier’s text on noise and genre, the animated film seriesghost in the shell, the propaganda of the virtual Buddhist terrorists and various myths of the extreme past and future.

DD: 
How would you describe the current human relationship to technology?
David Burrows: The nature of these relationships can only be guessed at. The development of various technologies will be seen as an evolutionary process in the future. Evolution can be thought of as realising many potential forms or organisations. In this, both chance and contingency may be involved in evolution. Most potential forms remain virtual, only some become actual.

If someone’s phone rings or pings and you reach to check your own phone, or you sense a vibration and think you have received a text but discover none has been sent or you check your phone when you see others doing so, your body has already been prepared for the next evolutionary stage.

As well as this, in the past, the relation of technology and humans has been understood through metaphors, fiction, images and myth, all of which can have an effect of the development of different technologies and everyday life. This is true today (an example being The Cloud) and will be so in the future.

DD: How does your work address this?
David Burrows: The work is a mytheme (or mysteme) for Neuropatheme (aka subject-without-experience, fux-the-shadow, otalP-the-empty-cave). Neuropatheme processes affects as information. Neuropatheme when fully plugged in realises that Neuropatheme is a sequence of processes and connections (exactly the same as being unplugged). Neuropatheme, feeling everything and nothing, is free of having to produce meaning and experiments with producing different feedback loops.


DD: 
How has thinking, theory and practice developed to address emergent technologies?
David Burrows: In diverse ways but always in part as imaginary, fiction or myth.


DD: 
How do you think art and the art world is adapting?
David Burrows: In the 60s and 70s, artists now called conceptual artists or associated with expanded art practice or expanded cinema where seen as radical but today they might be seen as pioneers and promoters of new and relatively available technology (fax machines, video, cheap air flights, Xerox, telephones, TV monitors) which transformed the world, commerce, leisure and culture. In the future, the same observation will probably be made about many of today’s artists.



DD: Most prescient and predictive artist/writer?
David Burrows: Nick Land and Sadie Plant

DD: 

What are the dangers with our current mode of technological interaction?
David Burrows: Narcissism



“Is this a fashion show or a funeral?” someone whispered into my ear on the first day of shows. But surprisingly, by the last day of LC:M a new kind of darkness emerged on the runway when designers sent out their own unusual breed of monsters and vampires. Of course there was a twist -Katie Eary's vampires weren’t concealed in black but rather covered in fuchsia flower prints, whilst Shaun Samson's monsters looked as though they had been taken from an American ice hockey team.

“Horror is something I am constantly obsessed with,” screamed Katie Eary backstage as her fang-wearing models walked past her. “I started by looking at eighteenth century paintings of banquets,” she continued. “I was looking at the food actually and then I thought what if there were bodies amongst it – this idea of eighteenth century gore.” This season, her prints did have an almost gore-like quality to them, particularly in the way her images were layered over each other. Flowers and lobsters were digitally manipulated in deep pinks, blacks and blues – translating the painterly quality of the eighteenth century images she referenced. Models appeared wearing gold chocker neck pieces and pointy fangs, allowing Eary to craft her own hybrid of streetwear vampire.

Christopher Kane also paid homage to the icons of horror in his menswear presentation. Dracula and Frankenstein both appeared on printed t-shirts and on velvet slippers, whilst his moody colour palette of midnight blues, blacks and deep purples were an nod to the darkness genre itself. Kane's use of fur took reference from werewolves and appeared on shirt collars and evening jackets.

For Shaun Samson, fur was also used as a reference to monsters in his streetwear-heavy collection. Models entered the runway wearing shabby fur earmuffs and ice hockey jumpers - Samson calling them his own “ice monsters.” Backstage, he claimed another important reference this season was camping - “For some reason, I always think that when you go camping you feel like you're in your pyjamas. There are monsters out in the woods and the only way you can protect yourself from the monsters is to say a prayer to God.”

Although Matthew Miller didn't claim that vampires or monsters were on his mind when designing his autumn / winter 13' collection, there was certainly a moody element this season. On the runway, his models appeared in uniform. Each with two of their fingers painted red, something Miller claimed was “a reference to anarchism,” but could have been taken from a modern horror film. The slogan 'Born to Fail' was printed in red on his garments, his “response to being fucked over by Generation X.”