Um. What does the economy have to do with jeans?
Writes the Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Akst, “If there is a silver lining to a financial crisis that threatens to leave the entire country dressed only in a barrel, it is this: At least we won’t be wearing denim.” Not only is denim hot, harsh, and frequently unflattering, says Akst, but it’s a sop to our national identity crisis:
If hypocrisy had a flag, it would be cut from denim, for it is in denim that we invest our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings — the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure, dragging down the global financial system with them. Denim is the SUV of fabrics, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a hulking Land Rover to the Whole Foods Market. Our fussily tailored blue jeans, prewashed and acid-treated to look not just old but even dirty, are really a sad disguise. They’re like Mao jackets, an unusually dreary form of sartorial conformity by means of which we reassure one another of our purity and good intentions.
Akst isn’t the first to critique denim; a number of the glamorous eccentrics profiled in Simon Doonan’s eponymous book cite it as a malign influence on individual style, and it’s generally regarded as a major part of the decline of smartness and occasion in dress. But if he thinks an economic downturn will spell the end of denim, he’s bound for disappoinment: unemployment doesn’t generally do much for the bespoke market, and there’s a lot to be said for a garment that can go an unseemly number of days between washes.
But in one thing, perhaps Akst and his ilk will be vindicated: if there’s one casualty of this marketplace, boutique denim seems like a likely candidate. Already, pre-downturn, the bubble was starting to burst. As brands like Cheap Monday and Blank started replicating of-the-moment styles for a fraction of the price, the three-hundred dollar jean became increasingly demode. And in the current economy, where utilitarianism becomes, daily, less of an affectation and more of a necessity, such excess seems downright obscene, however raw and organic the fabrication, however subtle the cut, however abstract the brand name. But jeans aren’t going anywhere – and for a reason Akst should understand. People crave uniforms we don’t need to think about, and as official dressing rules have broken down, ironically, the defiantly proletarian answer to archaic dress codes has become just as inviolate a de facto uniform. But at least now maybe we can start to remember why we started wearing denim in the first place: It’s cheap, durable, and doesn’t show dirt. When Lanvin can say that, we’ll talk.
Down With Denim [WSJ]