Skinny Jeans and iPhones

Skinny Jeans and iPhones

So the idea seems to be to get jeans that are so tight, if you have a tattoo on your butt everyone will know.  Even the young men seem to be in on this one.  Which I find a bit odd in that I can’t quite understand how they can deal with the obvious discomfort.  However, what do I know about style?  Nothing. Truly nothing at all.

When I’m heading out the door for work and my wife says I look nice, I have to look in the mirror to see what I’m wearing, because I don’t actually remember choosing anything.  “Nice outfit”.  What is an outfit anyway?  I kinda look in the closet and try to remember what is clean.

I have a system.  When I wear a shirt the first day out of the laundry, I roll the sleeves up.  Then I put it in the closet after I wear it once.  I let it air launder for a couple days, alternating with other shirts.  After two wearings I chuck it in the laundry.  Shirts last a lot longer that way.  It’s a system.  I’ve used it for years with a fairly limited number of shirts, so my style is wa-a-ay behind the curve. 

A slightly different system for most of my pants, except I can tell if I’ve worn them before or not by the receipts in the pockets..  If the receipts are a wad of lint, then they are fresh out of the laundry.

I teach High School, so I don’t have to have like expensive suits and stuff.  I just have to not look like an old bum.  I don’t have to wear a tie, but I usually do because I kind of like ties.  It gives me an edge over the all the teen-age energy rampaging around me all day.  Differentiates me from the weird clothes most of the kids seem to prefer. 

Which is stylish – what the kids wear and wouldn’t be caught dead not wearing.  Teen-agers are in-style or they are ostracized socially.  I think the biggest contributors to Charity Thrift Stores are the parents of teen-agers.  What they wore last year is just not going to work for a new school year.  Of course then, if they go on to college, they start going back to the Charity Thrift Stores to buy back their old clothes.  Tuition is a killer. 

Back to the skinny jeans.  First of all males should simply not wear them.  They look stupid on the male physic.  Like pony tails on balding old men.  Or diamond stud earrings on any man.  Some fashion items get far too trans-genderized to have any meaning.  But here’s the thing, the whole notion by jeans being so tight – well for one thing it has kind of stopped that jail-house style of young guys wearing pants below their butts.  That’s a good thing.

What I’m getting at is now it seems the jeans allow a young person to display what kind of Smartphone they have.  It used to be a well-dressed person did not want to have anything that caused their pockets to bulge.  This anti-bulge thing is what created the invention of the woman’s purse and a man’s wallet, inside jacket, pocket.  To avoid any bulging.  Now that obvious back pocket outline tells everybody if you have an old iPhone, or a new one (the new ones are bigger).  Or one of those huge Android things, which identifies you as a rebel. 

It seems to have become a bling object.  A statement.  It’s the subtle things that count sometimes.

DC Peterson

http://dalepeterson.us