Things and People: Distressed Denim Is Not a Shared History

Jeans can reach a buyer already worn-looking, without anyone having lived a day in them. In Things and People, Wolfgang Schivelbusch treats this factory-made wear as a curious exchange: industry mass-produces what once recorded an individual person’s use. Age can now be selected by size.

Yet the appearance of a used object is not the same as attachment to it. The most interesting question in this essay is not why we buy too much. It comes later: what happens between the purchase and the moment when a new replacement no longer seems quite adequate?

An Object Deteriorates—and Acquires a Face

In the introduction, Schivelbusch turns to the shoes of the narrator in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. Looking at their worn leather, wrinkles and seams, the narrator experiences something close to the return of a part of himself. Wear has two opposing consequences here. It brings the object closer to its end while making it less interchangeable with any other pair.

Alongside this, Schivelbusch places a letter from Flaubert to Louise Colet: old boots recall steps taken, grass trodden and mud accumulated. A new pair can be obtained; the past walks do not come with it.

This changes the perspective on consumption. Food disappears quickly; chairs, clothes and shoes are used up more slowly. While an object serves its purpose, it also loses material and shape. The traces of use become both damage and a kind of record of a shared life. They may reduce the object’s value to a seller while making it recognisable to its owner.

Schivelbusch is also interested in movement in the other direction. A foot does not only change a shoe: a new mass-produced shoe initially pinches, demands breaking in and requires the body to adapt. He describes such relations as assimilation. Read as an image rather than a precise physiological formula, it unsettles the convenient picture of a wholly passive object. Even an ordinary possession enables things, resists others and cultivates habits.

Not Every Factory-Made Object Is Empty

It would be easy to end with a sermon: craft is alive, industry is dead, objects used to have souls. But “Metamorphoses of Love for Things” offers a more interesting turn. In Schivelbusch’s account of Georg Simmel’s argument, an industrial object alienates us not simply because it lacks human participation. On the contrary, it gathers the work of many people, which an individual consumer can no longer grasp as a personal connection.

This helps separate an object’s origins from the whole of its subsequent life. A mass-produced item need not remain indifferent. Through use, it can acquire precisely the individual traces it lacked on leaving the factory. Equally, something made by hand is not, by that fact alone, a history of your relationship with it.

Factory-distressed jeans neatly test the distinction. A visible sign of time lived can be reproduced, just as an object can be bought ready-made to look antique. But the sign does not establish who lived through what. The manufacturer sells a prefabricated appearance of the past, not your past with that object.

This offers useful language for everyday memory: a cup, jacket or tool may matter more than the cost of a functional replacement. This is neither an obligation to keep everything nor a reason to feel ashamed of buying something new. “You can buy another just like it” sometimes answers a question about function when the person is talking about a relationship.

You can stop at that distinction. The extended history of economic concepts is for readers who want to follow Schivelbusch’s genealogy of consumption. For the particular question of personal possessions, the core is already visible: attachment develops through a relationship, not a guarantee supplied by an old appearance or a price tag. Wear can be copied. A shared life requires participation.

The Reading Decision

Book and author: Things and People: An Essay on Consumption — Wolfgang Schivelbusch. This English title translates the Ukrainian title for navigation; it does not identify a separate English edition read for this article.

Edition: the Ukrainian edition published jointly by Nika-Centre and Anetta Antonenko Publishers, 2018. Year and ISBN checked against the publisher’s page.[1]

Main idea: wear can make an object less saleable and more personal at the same time—but the look of wear alone does not make an object personal.

Relevance: a distinction between functional replacement and personal attachment that a single price cannot capture.

Read / pass: the account is useful if you are interested in attachment to familiar objects. Do not choose the book for instructions on shopping, decluttering or frugality; its purpose is different.

Verdict: a summary is enough, for the question of personal possessions. This does not assess the book’s entire journey through the history of consumption.

Source and Scope

The introduction, “The Power of Consumption,” and final chapter, “Metamorphoses of Love for Things,” were read in full in the Ukrainian edition. The discussion concerns use, wear and attachment; literary examples and the image of assimilation are not presented as universal laws. The other historical-economic arguments, physical analogies and broad concluding proposition about consumption and peace have not been corroborated here or adopted as explanations of the contemporary world.

Sources

[1] https://anetta-publishers.com/books/75 — Видавництво Анетти Антоненко — «Речі і люди»: видання 2018, ISBN 9786177192816