By the mid-sixties, blue jeans were an essential part of the wardrobe of those with a commitment to social struggle. In the American Deep South, black farmers and grandchildren of slaves still segregated from whites, continued to wear jeans in their mid-nineteenth-century sense; but now they were joined by college students-black and white-in a battle to overturn deeply embedded race hatred. The clothes of the workers became a sacred bond between them. The clothing of toil came to signify the dignity of struggle. In the student rebellion and the antiwar movement that followed, blue jeans and work shirts provided a contrast to the uniforms of the dominant culture. Jeans were the opposite of high fashion, the opposite of the suit or military uniform. With the rise of the women"s movement in the late 1960s, the political significance of dress became increasingly explicit; Rejecting orthodox sex roles, blue jeans were a woman"s weapon against uncomfortable popular fashions and the view that women should be passive. This was the cloth of action; the cloth of labor became the badge of freedom. If blue jeans were for rebels in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the 1980s they had become a foundation of fashion-available in a variety of colors, textures, fabrics, and fit. These simple pants have made the long journey "from workers" clothes to cultural revolt to status symbol." On television, in magazine advertising, on the sides of buildings and buses, jeans call out to us. Their humble past is obscured; practical roots are incorporated into a new aesthetic. Jeans are now the universal symbol of the individual and Western democracy. They are the costume of liberated women, with a fit tight enough to restrict like the harness of old-but with the look of freedom and motion. In blue jeans, fashion reveals itself as a complex world of history and change. Yet looking at fashions, in and of themselves, reveals situations that often defy understanding. Our ability to understand a specific fashion-the current one of jeans, for example-shows us that as we try to make sense of it, our confusion intensifies. It is a fashion whose very essence is contradiction and confusion. To pursue the goal of understanding is to move beyond the actual cloth itself, toward the more general phenomenon of fashion and the world in which it has risen to importance. Exploring the role of fashion within the social and political history of industrial America helps to reveal the parameters and possibilities of American society. The ultimate question is whether the development of images of rebellion into mass-produced fashions has actually resulted in social change. According to the author jeans are a fashion that______.

A. causes the change of world history
B. is beyond our understanding
C. makes no economic sense at all
D. causes contradiction and confusion among people