Post by One Funny Motha
I’m not talking about a return to the days when jeans extend all the way up to your neck. Or the time circa 1980 of pleated acid washed jeans to really highlight and enhance your burgeoning gut. I’m talking about a good, old-fashioned, fully functional, basic fitting garment that actually covers the body parts it’s designed to cover. I don’t think expecting your pants to come up past your ass is too much to ask. In fact, that used to be a basic principle of clothing.
I really don’t know what happened in the garment industry, but it seems it has completely dispensed with its 2,000-year history of manufacturing clothing for the purpose of clothing. Although we now have more options than ever with myriad styles, cuts and washes, sadly, none of them fit. It seems a cruel paradox.
Walk into any retailer and you’ll find a dizzying array of denim. Jeans that are skinny, super skinny, super duper skinny, straight skinny, slim skinny, slim shady, confining skinny, ultra uncomfortable skinny, and can’t-breath skinny. And that’s just the skinny category. Then there’s straight jeans, curvy jeans, straight curvy jeans, roundabout jeans, perfect boot cut jeans, sexy boot cut jeans, flare jeans and boyfriend jeans, not to be confused with sexy boyfriend jeans or metrosexual boyfriend jeans. I made that last one up, but I think the metrosexual is the one I need. The metrosexual boyfriend jean: fashionable yet fitting. Where can I find those?
While I may have trouble finding my perfect metrosexual boyfriend, I’m certainly not limited in my other choices. I can choose any finish from distressed to faded to whiskered to dark wash to not-too-dark-but-not-too-light wash to my personal favorite, worn crystal. Then you have the rises. There’s mid-rise, low-rise, ultra low-rise, low low-rise, and half-ass-hanging-out-rise. But where, I ask you, is the high-rise? Where is the standard cover your stomach so your flab doesn’t ooze over the side and form a muffin top rise?
And don’t even get me started on the skimmer jeans now available in stores for spring. There are approximately fifty-four thousand varieties of those too. By the end of sorting through the vast deep blue sea of denim, casting aside pair after imperceptibly different pair, in search of your size only to find one in the wrong length (regular, long or ankle) because for some reason The Gap thinks the average American woman is 10 feet tall, you’ll have to ask the salesperson, who is perched on a ladder stocking the highest rungs of the towering floor to ceiling denim display, for help.
“Um, excuse, me. Sorry I just trashed the whole pile of jeans you painstakingly folded and now will have to refold all over again, but do you have the dark wash always skinny skimmer jeans in mid rise size 8 in ankle length? I don’t see it here.” To which the perky 23-year-old sales clerk will inevitably respond, “Well, we have the dark wash deconstructed always skinny skimmer jeans in size 8 ankle but in low rise. Or the super skinny always skinny skimmer legging jeans in 8 ankle, but not in dark wash and those only come in ultra low rise.”
“Let’s make this a little easier,” you exhale, grasping at a shred of hope. “Do you have anyskinny jeans in this store that are mid rise in size 8 ankle?”
“No, sorry,” says the gum-chomping salesperson, returning to the towering wall of denim, and you don’t get the sense she’s genuinely saddened by your loss.
“But you have a millionjeans in this store,” you persist, struggling to understand. “How could you not have any in my size?”
But it’s no use because you are not 18 and the world and the jeans are stacked against you.
Please note, because I’d really like to avoid any confusion, and with full understanding I think all women can come to agreement on one very important point: I am not under any circumstances advocating for the high-to-your-eye rise jean. What I’m calling for here is a new jean, a better jean, a technologically enhanced jean. This is not your Mom’s mom jeans. I’m talking about a 21st century jean with a delicate balance of fashion and function for any woman who has birthed a child or developed beyond the age of 18. This is a jean for the modern woman, one who would like to maintain a fashion sense along with her dignity. A jean with a rise that falls comfortably between one’s rib cage and ass crack, because while we’ve been subjected to unwanted crack sightings for years and have become desensitized to it, I maintain crack is now and forever shall be whack.
What really perplexes me about the whole situation is why we don’t already have such a jean. My idea isn’t some wild fantasy. I know it can be done because it has been done. I remember well those heady days when clothing actually fit. In fact, fitting pants are still being made for men, which is what makes the problem with jeans being made for the normal human female shape rather than only the teenage form, that much harder to understand.
I remember wistfully a life before muffin tops, when jeans didn’t need to be hiked up every five minutes so as to prevent underwear (or worse) from showing, when jeans didn’t require special compatible or complementary underwear because undergarments actually remained under your garments. I remember when people were embarrassed by their crack showing, when being caught with a plumber’s crack was the height of humiliation. Sadly, those days are gone. Ass crack has now become a common part of daily life. Innocent bystanders are being subjected to it daily without consent, and I submit to you a society in which mass unwanted crack flashings are tolerated is not a civilized society at all.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We had fitting jeans once, and we could have them again. We must demand it. We must rise up and demand that our jeans rise up as well because while we may now have a multitude of rises, they have not risen far enough.
Please put your crack away...
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