play in making denim the standard equipment of the US American youth in the 1960s and thereafter. Frank argues that in a time when conformity was the norm, consumer culture became principally concerned with instructing consumers on how to maintain identity and purpose. Levi Strauss and Co detected a US American imaginary that its product was integral to, and appropriated its imaginary into US and global consumer culture to make jeans one of the world’s most ubiquitous garments. Throughout the 20th century, youth culture remained the cultural form of the corporate moment as today consumer culture remains suffused with pseudo-rebellious conjecture and commercial escapism. Over the years, Iggy Pop, Gil Scott Heron and the Beatles have sold Nike …show more content…
Goldman describes an age of hypersignification, referring to Levi’s “Wildman” advertisement, in which there are twenty-two separate shots of hands and twenty-six separate shots of eyes and/or facial expressions; a technique which aims to abstract body parts from the human subject to meet the imperative of breaking through the “advertising clutter” of consumer culture with high intensity of disparate flashing images. Elsewhere Berardi discusses what he refers to as the “ersatz of modern communication” through the commercial landscapes in which the production of meaning and value takes the form of parthenogenesis: “signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh.” Nonetheless, as Botterill argues, though promotional content may not be anchored to any referent or reality, brands and advertisers do “try exceptionally hard to construct meaning for their audience” and that on some level consumer culture is therapeutic. Marketers use themes of nostalgia to tap into what Stern calls the consumers “vast structure of recollection,” reviving products and promotions associated with the past, and reorienting these recollections of the past in favor of hypercommercialised