Monday, January 3, 2005

There comes a time in every man’s life when, right around Christmas, the desire for denim seizes him like a reclaimed birthright. It tempts him, causes him to go mad, and when the insanity settles he awakens with a new pair of jeans. I woke like this a few days ago, and the story of how I arrived at this precise condition is one speckled with discovery and pain.

Denim is not entirely foreign to me, because I spent the better part of my childhood wearing it. I had a falling out with my jeans in high school, every single one of them, but I changed my tune after one of my khakis died recently. This much I’ve learned: as far as clothes are concerned, I should’ve lived during the 50’s or 60’s. That does it for the discovery part, now for the pain.

Walk into Abercrombie or Aeropostale and you will behold, in snapshot after contrived snapshot, men and women immortalized in moments of time, all of them grinning like idiots because their clothes have presumably negated their cares. Cares like bills. Getting along with people. Getting into college. Getting tetanus from sitting half-naked on top of a rusty vintage truck. What these vignettes don’t show is how these people obtained their clothes. You see, dear reader, this process is what reduces grown men to tears and grown women to fits of anguished wailing.

I went into the store hoping to leave in 15 minutes and promptly tripped on a table of jeans. My pride slightly bruised, I marveled over the fantastic deal upon which I’d stumbled. $34.95 for honest-to-goodness pants. What a steal! It’s not like I wanted to spend my money on something else.

Then I tripped, figuratively so, over the absurd number of choices offered to me. Distressed. Classic Distressed. Bootcut Distressed. Obliterated Vintage. Obliterated Bootcut Distressed. The state of denim, it appeared, was on a nihilistic rollercoaster bound for an empty display table that could only burst into unholy flames. I selected a pair from the Destroyed line and headed to the fitting rooms.

My first thought went, “It really smells in here.” After making sure I wasn’t the olfactory loser, I proceeded to try on these professionally decimated pants. And then my toe caught in one of the craters of destruction and ripped the jeans a little bit.

“Well, shit,” I said under my breath.

Without going to fashion school or any centers of chic, I had upgraded this specific pair from Destroyed to Freaking Awesome. I reasoned they could only charge more for them at this point, and back to the rack they went.

About 40 minutes elapsed before I decided to purchase two pairs from the Vintage line, which basically meant they weren’t torn to shreds by some wretched 4-year-old paid $0.17 hourly. Since the line had grown to a sizable length, it was perfectly logical to reduce the number of cashiers to a single woman, who insisted on looking you straight in the eye (even though you were a mere three feet away) and shouting, “Can I help the next person?”

I paid for my haul, but not before tripping over a partition. I hadn’t felt this ungraceful since 10th grade, a chilly afternoon, when my coach roared over the din during football practice.

“CATCH IT WITH YOUR FACE, WU!” he screamed.

I’m just kidding. It was actually soccer practice. Irrelevant tangents aside, though, I left the store noticeably poorer but also accoutered for the times. Next stop? We all get naked, charge ourselves $149.95 a pop, and call it “Completely Dissolved Outrewear.” That’s right, you read correctly. The “r” goes before the “e.”