In the 1960s, the slogan ‘the Polish youth sings Polish songs’ was popularized, but with the potential slogan ‘the Polish youth wears Polish jeans’ would have been much harder. In 1964, the Odra Clothing Industry Plant was officially opened in Szczecin. Their flagship product was the material tekspol – a local response to the desired denim fabric. However, people often complained about its quality (apparently unjustly) and about the colour – instead of the desired blue colour, they were usually dirty-grey. The Polish replacement for American denim, referred to as ‘teksas’ or ‘arizona’, was produced by the Rena-Rekord plant in Łódź. Regardless, the fashionable youth was willing to – if they had the resources – pay ten times more for Levi’s or Wranglers rather than walk in ‘Odras’ or ‘Krakowskie rekordy’ – the domestic product was neither cool nor fancy at all!
Both the series Civil War directed by Jerzy Gruza, and Maria Zientarowa’s feuilletons published in Przekrój under the same title on which the show was based, can be used as a guides to understand the youth trends of the 1960s. The domestic garment industry was not able to keep up with baby boomers, so in Civil War, unprofessional modifications of clothes and homemade tailoring were plenty. At her own cost, Anula conjures up a variety of outfits: from jeans to a Brigitte Bardot type of dress. Of course, Western artefacts had to appear: Levi’s or the ‘Texas Rangers’ jacket. Paweł was experiencing fashion problems at home. His father, old-fashioned, cursed the ‘tracksuits, dungarees, moccasins, jeans, and polo shirts’.
These generational differences can still be seen in the Polish series A Forty-Year-Old from the second half of the 1970s. You will never find the serious and stable engineer Karwowski wearing denim, and his children, Jagoda and Marek, all the more. The idol of bullies from the right-bank of Warsaw, Tolek Banan, ‘had old jeans and an old shirt’.
The trend found itself in all types of series, not just those directed at youth. For example, Borewicz from 07 Report – his image of a modern militia officer was to be emphasized by stylish clothes (he doesn’t wear a uniform at all), including Wranglers. Was this how the young audience interpreted the style of the lieutenant? Barbara Hoff wrote in the feuilleton Wszyscy Mają Dżinsy (Everyone Has Jeans) from 1978, 20 years after she announced jeans as being the trousers of the era:
