Home delivery
Contact us
Your account

E-mail article     Print view

Fancy Pants

Patched, worn, torn and otherwise tattered, of course they cost a fortune!

PREV |  of  | NEXT

ILLUSTRATED BY PAUL SCHMID

THE OTHER DAY Mrs. Johnston saw me staring at a young woman's backside. She gave me a sharp poke in the ribs and hissed, "Stop staring."

But I couldn't stop looking. I couldn't help myself. What I saw was amazing, so amazing that I had to ask the young woman a question.

"Excuse me," I said. "But where did you get those?"

By "those" I meant the young woman's pants. They looked sort of like jeans, but if she had been wearing a pair of jeans like these jeans when I was a kid, people would have thought the young woman was too poor to afford a good pair.

"Did you see that poor Jones girl?" people would say. "Her pants look like they were rotting. There were big holes in those jeans, and the cuffs were all ragged. That poor girl. It's such a shame."

"And it looks like someone tried to patch them up," another would say. "I didn't know her family was in such financial trouble that they have to wear their pants until they fall apart."

But this young woman was happy to tell me where she purchased her jeans (it was some upscale store where the dummies in the windows look like they're dressed up for Halloween), and then she told me the price . . .

(A word of caution here for my more financially challenged readers. These are readers who can remember when you could buy a home in Seattle that didn't cost a half-million, and when you could fill your gas tank for less than $20 — people who are closer to retiring from their careers than starting out on their careers. These readers should set aside the magazine, lie down on a couch and take three deep breaths before continuing. Ready? OK here goes . . .)

The price for this pair of raggy jeans was $125! That's not a misprint. This young woman paid one hundred and twenty-five Big Ones for a pair of jeans that I would have used to wash my car if I owned them.

I guess what made these jeans so expensive was the care someone put into making them look like something you would find in a pile of rags. The jeans were the usual faded blue, like they had been worn for several years. They had the usual holes in the knees, and the pant-leg bottoms were tattered.

Apparently, a designer had torn apart two or three pairs of other pants and sewed the different pieces to these jeans. So where the pockets normally go, there were strips of other jeans. The strips were different colors — some more faded than others — and different types of jean material than the rest of the jeans.

I suppose there is somebody who went to design school and came up with the idea of cutting up several pairs of jeans, sewing them together and then selling them for $125.

After closely examining other designer jeans, I've started to wonder how these jeans got to be in such bad shape in the first place. Every pair I've seen were faded in different places. Holes were tastefully placed in the knees or on the pockets. Even the holes looked cool; not the kind of holes that normally show up on jeans of people who wear them to work.

No, someone put a lot of thought into making these jeans look old and used as if they were worn by someone who worked for a living.

Which brings up the question: Who is wearing these jeans so they look old and faded? I mean, do the jeans designers hire people to wear their new jeans and roll around in the dirt? Is there a whole country filled with people wearing brand new jeans, going about their daily lives of trying to make a living but making sure they wear out selected spots in their jeans?

If there is such a job, maybe called "Designer Jean Wear Facilitator," I have a few kids who could put on new jeans, roll in the dirt and wear them out.

In fact, it sounds like a job the whole Johnston family could do.

Steve Johnston is a retired Seattle Times reporter. His e-mail address is stevejonst@aol.com. Paul Schmid is a Seattle Times news artist.