If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are wearing clothes. Or my byline photo made you spontaneously strip down to nothing but a pair of crusty underwear and a smile. I don’t judge, and I also don’t blame you. That photo is from a decade ago.
Assuming you’re in clothes, then you had to decide what to wear. It’s an arduous task for most of us – the rummaging in a closet, color coordinating, the classic “smell” test to confirm you can go another week without doing your laundry. For me, dressing is a joy. I have multiple closets stocked with clothes – suits, mostly. I have some shorts, some sweats, hoodies and T-shirts, but those are for special occasions only. Like a kid’s birthday or a hangover.
You know what you won’t find in my closet?
Jeans.
I hate jeans. Not even a poorly conceived Sydney Sweeney commercial could convince me I needed to buy jeans. If I had to choose between wearing denim and one of those barrels cartoon hobos wear, I’d choose the barrel. Far more dignified. Jeans were created for gold miners so they didn’t rip their pants while sloshing in a river full of jagged rocks. I panned for gold once, on a school field trip to Sutter’s Fort in fifth grade. I was not asked to go pro.
Jeans make some people look like Bruce Springsteen – macho, blue collar and soulful. Jeans make me look like my dad – balding, with bad posture and a curious mustard stain on my crotch. Suits make me look grown up. Jeans make me look ground down. They make me look washed, cooked, chopped and all the other things my kid yells at me when I try to bend over to pick up one of his toys and I screech in pain.
You can wear jeans if you want. I won’t stop you, but please, cease and desist with the denim discourse. A recent GQ article from July titled “I Went Back to Skinny Jeans, and It Feels Incredible” is the latest in a cottage industry of fashion articles that give you permission to do something we all decided was lame a few years ago. Another GQ article from this year, called “Sperry Boat Shoes Won Me Back. I Never Should’ve Docked ‘Em” assured nervous young men that Sperry Top-Siders are actually not five-alarm fire, dweeb alert material, but an “American classic”. We should all be sure to have Top-Siders under our bed, in case a yachting regatta spontaneously breaks out within walking distance of our house, the local crew team is looking for a coxswain, or Jordan Belfort needs help committing a complex financial crime.
I’m in my early 40s (hence the screeching and the back pain and the child) and I have lived through a variety of trends at this point. I remember JNCO Jeans, which were wide enough to smuggle an entire 2-liter bottle of orange soda into a matinee screening of The Crow. I’ve seen bucket hats come and go, mostly timed to whether or not Oasis was touring. I understand the imperative to keep changing how people dress so that they will never stop buying more clothes. If we ever collectively stopped buying clothes we didn’t need, pollution-generating factories around the world would disappear, access to fresh water would increase and we’d be robbing the world of millions of borderline slave-labor jobs. So we keep generating content designed to make people buy new versions of clothes they gave away five years ago, because the same publication told them what they already owned sucked.
No item of clothing seems to go through revisions more than jeans. They get wider, narrower, higher or lower depending on which way the fashion industry wind blows. The expensive jeans you bought in 2022 are potentially out of step three years later. If you are entirely devoid of an individual sense of style, you will cycle through all these permutations of denim in order to maintain the shred of self-esteem you have left that comes from recognizing your pants in a paparazzi photo of Jacob Elordi.
I didn’t stop wearing skinny jeans because they went out of fashion. I stopped because I can’t fit into them comfortably. They objectively do not look good on me. I look like an old man trying to seem young. The author of the GQ article about skinny jeans refers to his ideal personal style as “Regular Millennial Guy Look”. Oh, to be regular, to be just a “guy” again! What heaven it would be. If I could press a button and be 25 again, I would. But buying the same clothes I wore when I was 25, desperate to fit in and not be noticed by anyone, is not going to magically make me 25 again.
Worse yet, the writer describes what sounds like a minor cardiac event that occurred when he dipped back into the world of skinny jeans. “On a whim I decided to wrestle my way into a pair of Petit Standards. Behind the velvet curtain, red in the face and out of breath – but for once, it was me in the mirror.” I support anyone who feels comfortable in what they wear, but if your journey of self-discovery involves the warning signs of a heart attack, maybe there are other options out there for you.
The longer I’m on this planet, the less I care about the various permutations of the fashion industry, its blatant greed and a stunning lack of creative energy. There are exceptions, mostly smaller labels fronted by young designers, but luxury fashion is controlled by billionaire conglomerates that care more about maximizing profits than making anything worth owning. Fast fashion is contributing to global pollution at an alarming rate. And the fashion media just wants you to keep buying more junk. No one will ever convince me to buy jeans. I don’t need jeans. Skinny, wide or otherwise.
Now, if GQ would report on the resurgence of hobos wearing barrels, maybe I’d see things a little differently.
