Sensing the City

­registers of international popular culture. Another term that is frequently used is ‘Kanakenstyle’, which takes up a partly re-signified, but still offensive, racist insult.

In its initial advertising and store decoration, Picaldi built on gangster references, putting up ‘Scarface’ screenshots, and stressed their cheap prices, comparing themselves, tongue-in-cheek, to a discount supermarket chain (‘Nix Aldi, Picaldi!’). ­Picaldi’s jeans were sold much cheaper than Diesel’s ‘Saddle’, at about 35 euros or half the price.

Picaldi found a second major group of dedicated customers, largely working­class, white German young men in the former East (of the city and the country), many of whom live in areas with a small presence of immigrants, relatively low ­average i­ncomes, a high unemployment rate. The spread or diffusion of this specific style from an immigrant, lower or working-class setting to an autochtonous lower or working-class group can be described as transversal in character in that it crosses the social field, bypassing the symbolic centre. On the face of it, this combination of niche markets seems surprising, given the prevalence of anti-immigrant and ­racist sentiments among the latter group. In the case of Picaldi’s original customer base, this type of outfit was in fashion long before the company picked them up. The stylistic practice and inventiveness seems thus relatively autonomous from commercial strategies. In the East German case, there exists a specific continuity ­regarding milieu-specific taste preferences, tied to masculine body images, movement sequences, and overall style in the presentation of self. This partly explains the popularity of this type of denim, and the brand that has come to stand for it, across an ethnic line that is otherwise much harder to traverse.

In socioeconomic and occupational terms, Picaldi’s customer base is somewhat ­d iverse, but it is predominantly – though certainly not exclusively – recruited from the working class and lower middle class, and, in terms of the education system, from the vocationally oriented middle and high schools (Hauptschulen, Realschulen, Berufs­ schulen). Both the views of many Picaldi employees I interviewed and a small customer survey (with about 100 respondents) I completed in late 2007 confirm this assumption. Much to the chagrin of many among the company’s leaders and employees, in the view of outsiders and in various media outlets, ‘Picaldi’ has come to stand much more narrowly for an ‘underclass’ of welfare recipients and violent offenders; the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, illustrated a reporting piece on living conditions of unemployment/welfare-recipients ( Hartz IV) with the high price of a pair of Picaldi jeans, and various other articles in the press reiterated such associations.7 91