"The Fingerprint of the Second Skin" by Kitty Hauser,
Fashion and Modernity, edited by Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans, pp. 153-170

• "Marx... was ... made vividly aware of how an object can again become 'a commodity and an exchange value' only when it 'is stripped of its particularity and history' (165)"
• Is Hauser trying to use this to back up the earlier argument that commomdity loses its commodity-ness once it gets purchased and used by an individual? Because the individual's usage of that commodity inevitably gives it her "fingerprints" of her personality and the historical time that she's living in? By the way, to clarify, what I mean by "commodity-ness" is the aura that a commodity got created by a machine, not by a maker... that it came out of nowhere and has no human touch (this is a paraphrase and my take on Marx's idea on page 164).
• "For the FBI did not so much reveal the latent image of labour embedded in jeans, as show how this image is itself revealed as a matter of course by the jeans' wearer over time (166)."
• From Spokane's investigation, Hauser discovers that the wearer's wear and tear subverts this commodity-fetishism idea. While Marx would argue that a pair of jeans has nothing about it that reveals about its maker, Spokane cleverly learned about the ways in which the jeans were sewed up by the manufacturer.
• One of my issue with Hauser though is that she over emphasizes the importance of a manufacturer's traces or "fingerprints". I am much more fascinated by how an individual's habbits produce different wear and tear in small, insignificant part like a seam in pants. I get the impresion that Hauser is stretching it a bit too much to make this discovery by Spokane fit (in opositionite manner) with Marx's fetish commodity idea.