Establishing authenticity and commodifying difference: a social semiotic analysis of Sámi jeans

Abstract

This article investigates a semiotic phenomenon within the global fashion industry: the branding of designer jeans as ‘authentic’ and ‘genuinely local’, focusing on the Swedish brand Sarva. Drawing on a social semiotics approach, the authors see authenticity as a discursive construct and look at the ways in which Sarva authenticate their jeans as Sámi in multimodal texts. The aim is: (1) to reveal how places and narratives are commodified in texts that accompany the jeans; and (2) to explore how authenticity is materially instantiated in the jeans by using different resources. The article focuses on the connotative provenance and affordances of different semiotic materials for the rendering of authenticity. The analysis of the jeans as semiotic entities reveals how the thickness of the garment, texture and leather details, and the choice of materials, languages as well as iconography, evoke ideas about historical and local ‘Sáminess’, whilst at the same time indexing a global ideology that regiments what quality jeans are. The analysis shows how authenticity can be reinvented and relocated in ways that allow a commodity to travel between the local and the global. It also shows how this movement is not neutral or straightforward, but rooted in power relations that underlie globalization and advanced capitalism.

Affect as a multimodal practice

“…Firstly, the affordance of a pair of high-end designer jeans that are promoted as “Sámi inspired” will be considered. The analysis focuses on how affective subject formation is afforded “in” the jeans through different design choices pertaining to fabric weight and texture in particular (Archer and Westberg, 2020; Bouvier, 2016, 2018).…”

Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of the Sámi

“…This is particularly salient in tourism discourse and indigenous consumption (cf. Thurlow and Jaworski 2011;Heller and Duchêne 2012;Archer and Westberg 2020), but the denotations also have a wider cross-cultural resonance. They can be traced back to commercial stock images, for example, in image banks such as Getty Images (cf.…”

“…Whereas affective meaning-making afforded through photography and appreciations allows global mobility, the linguistic signification of locations and experiences with Sámi names in combination with visual elements with provenance in Sámi heritage (Figures 2 and 3) ensures authentic differentiation. However, whereas the interpretation of such visual differentiation depends on socially and culturally shaped knowledge and transtextual recognition, (Archer and Westberg 2020), language does so to a lesser extent. Further, the appreciations fulfill crucial affective work in that they anchor the visual connotations in a way that reduces any affective ambiguity; Sámi authenticity emerges as a matter of pure, recognizable pleasure.…”

“…The desire to experience something genuine and different lies at the heart of global capitalism and, in its circulation of commodities, identities and ideologies (Appadurai 1996), multimodal discourse is used to profit on emotions and values associated with authenticity (Aiello and Pauwels 2014). In particular, this pertains to different niches of indigenous consumption in which notions of "indigenousness" are capitalized on in order to profile brands as different and desirable (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013;Kauppinen 2014;Dlaske 2015;Viken and Müller 2017b;Archer and Westberg 2020). Heller and Duchêne emphasize that such profiting practices not only have a fundamental socioeconomic impact on the way indigenous people organize their livelihood, but also on how people "make sense out of and feel about things" (2012,8).…”

Feeling safe while being surveilled: the spatial semiotics of affect at international airports

“…Therefore, the analytical task that is undertaken is to map and "decipher" (cf. Lefebvre 1991, 33, 38) the spatial characteristics of the international airport and to explore how embodied and emplaced claims for affect are afforded through spatial design (Aiello and Dickinson 2014;Archer and Westberg 2020). Put differently, the paper delves into how tangible resources at international airports regiment (Wee 2016) the prerequisites for air travelers to experience feelings of, for instance, "freedom" and "being in control" or of being constantly "monitored", "controlled", and "segregated".…”