The Jeanetic Code

A few days ago I was out on some last minute shopping with my two older sisters, as well as my cousin, and Josey (the younger of my two siblings) decided we needed to stop in at Luna. Luna is a small clothing store in a small but popular commercial zone of Columbia, SC. I'd never been in before.

The store is about the size of a tennis court. I looked to my right and saw the Men's' section, which would have fit inside a bathroom. I probably have more clothes in my closet than they had on their racks. I guess quality was their game.

"Oooh, Paper&Denim," Josey cooed, fondling a pair of jeans. "You'd look so good in Paper&Denim." Josey went to Columbia University for undergrad, and now attends UCLA, so she's somewhat of a fashionista. And while I'm no stranger to GQ (It's my go-to magazine for airplanes) fashion means different things to us: To her it means "Clothes made from high quality materials by talented designers cut meticulously to appear stylish and sexy, at a price that is high but worth it," whereas to me it means "Clothes that look pretty good and aren't so expensive that I feel guilty when my mom buys them for me."

I've never heard of Paper&Denim. But I'm always willing to try on a pair of jeans. You never know when you might find a pair that makes you so ruggedly sexy that women tackle you on the street. So while everyone else in my party went off to look at the girl's section, I found a pair of this Paper&Denim in my size.

I no sooner had them off the rack than a young saleswoman came up to me.
"Can get a room started for you?" she asked.
"Huh?" I replied. Always smooth with the ladies, that's me.
"I'll take these to a dressing room for you," she said.
"Uh, okay." Was she going to draw a bath for me as well? Did I look incapable of carrying one pair of jeans to a dressing room? Actually, I probably did. When I go into clothing stores I'm like Stevie Wonder in a House of Mirrors: absolutely no idea what's going on.

Eventually I found my room, which was essentially a poorly lit changing room with no lock on the door. I traded my tried-and-true, bought-at-Target jeans for the Paper&Denim, and looked in the mirror. I looked pretty bad. It's hard to describe why exactly, but they weren't working for me. Oh well, no big deal, really I was just killing time while my sisters shopped. As I was folding them back up, though, I happened to look at the price tag: $178.

Ok, what the hell. Not that I condemn spending money for clothes. I myself have a particular weakness for hats, and so I understand that sometimes you have to spend good money to get something that looks good, but $178? Who were they trying to fool? I know jeans have gotten pretty stylish now, to the point where any day now people are going to start wearing them to funerals, but it still shocks me to see a price - especially on a pair of guy's jeans - that would buy you a Playstation.

I had a similar experience right after I moved to Boston for college. I was down in Harvard Square, wandering around, checking out the sights, and keeping my eye out for a new pair of jeans, when I saw a Diesel store. Hmmm, I thought. I didn't know much about Diesel, except that their advertisements conveyed rugged stylishness that I thought gelled well with my romantic vision of myself. However, I had just spent the previous year in Japan, and missed the whole process by which jeans began to cost more than insulin. As far as I knew, you got jeans at Target for $24.99, they came in blue, and the only style choice was whether or not they had the little loop on the side for a hammer.

So I walked into the Diesel store, as innocent and helpless as a cat wandering into a Chinese restaurant. Immediately the salesman asked if I needed help finding anything. I told him I was looking for jeans in such and such measurements. He assured me that they had them, and then I asked, "How much would they cost?"

"140 dollars," he said, without blinking an eye.

"Oh," I said. I was dumbstruck. The concept of a pair of jeans costing $140 was as foreign to me as paying money to be spit on. I couldn't think of what to say. "That's really expensive," was the best I could manage. Then without further ado, I turned and slunk out of the store, never to return.

Back here in the present day, I've acclimated slightly to this phenomenon of expensive jeans, and since my sisters were still going strong, I decided to have some fun. I went back over to the men's section, and found every style of jean that came in my size. Regretfully the most expensive pair, at $258, seemed targeted at slightly larger-waisted people than I.

Another saleswoman came and took all the jeans - six pairs this time - and got another room ready. When I walked in, they were all hanging up, on display like paintings in a museum. Quickly I tried them on one after another. Six pairs, and in maybe two minutes I'd evaluated them all. And how did they make me look? In a word: gay.

And I know we aren't supposed to use words like that, but frankly it's true. Those jeans would only be appropriate if I were in Greenwich Village drinking Cosmopolitans at a bar called the Screwdriver. And I didn't even look like a stylish gay man; I looked like a gay man who bought overpriced jeans in a desperate bid to have people overlook his shitty personality. No self-respecting gay man who fit the stereotype of being sartorially intelligent would buy these pants.

Bottom line is I tried on $1000 dollars worth of jeans, and actually felt worse when I finished. I walked out of the dressing room and handed then all back to the saleslady. My sisters were finished shopping.
"How did the jeans work out," Ricky asked. "How'd you look?"
"I looked gay," I replied sharply. Not the most mature response, I know, but something about the whole experience had made me bitter. The saleswoman overheard and laughed shortly, but I know inside she agreed with me. She sees guys walk in there, with their gelled hair and popped collars on their pink Polo shirts, and they buy $400 dollars of pants, and strut around and just one day she wants to yell "FOR GOD'S SAKES GO OUT AND PUT ON SOME WRANGLERS!" But she can't, because she's part of the system.

My sisters, of course, tried to justify the existence of such expensive jeans, citing the difficulty of finding a cut that fits well, the longevity of a well-made pair, and of course the fact that one can wear jeans every day of his or her life. I agree that those are all valid points - if you're a woman. At the risk of appearing callous, boorish even, I'm going to say that guys, in our lower bodies, do not exhibit the great variety, nor the excruciating need for flattery, that girls do. And I see nothing wrong with the efforts girls put in to finding a flattering pair of jeans. In fact, I see quite a bit of good in it, and if some girl needs to spend $200 dollars so that I can admire her ass, then that's just the way it has to be. But not for me. All I know is I tried on $1000 dollars worth of jeans and didn't come any closer to having sex. At the least one of the saleswomen should have burst in on me, I mean that's the only plausible reason that there aren't locks on the changing room doors. Ultimately, I'm not properly convinced of the necessity of owning a $200 pair of jeans. And anyway, there's no chance that my mom would by them for me.