Humans 101

I have very few opinions about fashion, and almost all of them only pertain to strippers. So, I was pretty excited when my fashion historian friend, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, agreed with my boldest style pronouncement: Jeans are a plague upon humanity.

Kimberly’s new book, Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century, is a celebration of the unpantsed. A life she’s lived nearly uncompromised since I met her in college. Which was in the 1990s. Where she wore dresses to work at our school newspaper. This was only slightly less crazy than wearing stripper clothes.

A few years after we graduated, I internalized Kimberly’s rebellion. Although not in the elegant manner she chose.

Immediately upon walking through the door at the end of each evening, I’d struggle out of my trousers like an uncoordinated Chippendale. Then I’d throw them as far from me as I could, and yell, “The tyranny of pants!” I did not only do this upon entering my own front door. I did it upon entering any front door. My mom’s door when I stayed there. My friend Patty’s door when I stayed with her in L.A. A new girlfriend’s door. This is back when I barely drank.

The white-hot center of my ire wasn’t pants, which I accepted as a necessary evil, but jeans. Jeans are made of denim, a material which would only be called comfortable if burlap could talk. Jeans are meant not only for work I don’t do but work I don’t know how to do. They were created for gold miners so optimistic they thought they’d need rivets to hold all the nuggets they’d acquire. That’s the equivalent in 2022 of buying a Bitcoin wallet. Jeans are meant to protect you from cuts and motorcycle road burns. Wearing them to dinner makes as much sense as wearing a hazmat suit. Before Covid.

Despite this, people are always talking about how comfortable their jeans are. Which is clearly not true because designers have replaced 99 percent of denim in jeans with some kind of silly putty, effectively making denim-colored yoga pants — and yet they still don’t feel good.

Yet Kimberly says there’s a deeper comfort that jeans provide. “You’re getting lots of psychological comfort from them. You can say the same for corsets or bras. Because not wearing them would be psychologically uncomfortable. You’re not going out without pants because that would make you psychologically uncomfortable.” I wish Kimberly had told that last part to a 23-year-old me.

But the psychological comfort of jeans is perplexing because no one looks good in jeans except for people who look good in anything and squat a lot. Basically, attractive baseball catchers. People have been fooled that jeans are fashionable despite the fact that they are the bottom half of overalls. I look way better in chinos, khakis, gray flannel trousers, and sweatpants. Because my underwear doesn’t pop out the back of any of them.

A professor of anthropology and a professor of sociology tried to figure out why this fashion disaster happened by creating the Global Denim Project. They’ve estimated that at any given moment, more than half of people on the planet who out of their homes are wearing jeans. That’s partly because unlike most fashion, jeans have barely changed over 150 years. Which has allowed them to become what you see in every science fiction movie: a globalized genderless uniform. Jeans are not a choice. They are the fashion of fear.

“You can dress them up. You can dress them down. People feel like if they’re wearing jeans, they are going to be appropriately dressed wherever they go, and they’re not going to stand out,” Kimberly says in a way that should make you feel sad.

Sure, you can personalize your jeans uniform — expensive Rag & Bone, rural Wranglers, holes-ridden skater wear — but that’s no more than stitching a patch onto your school uniform.

Jeans do have a history of rebellion. Putting on jeans in the 1960s, when they were all cheap, was a college kid’s show of solidarity with the working class, which I’m sure the working class didn’t find at all patronizing. But at least there was Bolshevik sacrifice; wearing jeans meant that you couldn’t get into country clubs, land a corporate job, eat at expensive restaurants, or be in their parents’ will.

As Kimberly shows in her book, pants of any kind weren’t acceptable for women until the late 1970s. Sure, Mary Tyler Moore wore them on The Dick Van Dyke Show (SP), but only in the house. No woman wore pants to Congress until 1969. And Republican Charlotte Reid said she only did it because it was the last day of the session before Christmas break when things get crazy. “I am really quite serious about my service in the Congress and I wouldn’t want to do anything that seemed facetious,” she said. In 2008, the 21 Club in Manhattan told me that I couldn’t come in for dinner even though I was wearing a jacket, a tie, and the $120 skinny jeans my wife convinced me to buy and I called my “hurty jeans” — and was accompanied by Walter Isaacson and Al Franken. It was the second dumbest thing anyone ever did to Al Franken.

Jeans eventually became accepted everywhere. “The whole history of fashion is one generation’s casual clothing becoming the next generation’s formal clothing,” Kimberly explained. “The tuxedo was the casual alternative to white tie and tails. Today you see white tie and tails maybe at a royal banquet. Today a three-piece suit would be very formal, but it’s less formal than the morning coat that it was a casual alternative to. If you look at the French Revolution the sans-culottes wore long pants which were different than knee breeches. Only a working-class person would wear long pants. Nobody wears breeches anywhere now.”

But now that women won the pants battle and the 21 Club has closed, we can take off our war uniforms. Lockdown was jeans first setback in nearly a century. “If you’re sitting around the house they’re going to dig in or stretch out. That’s why people are now talking about athleisure, jogging pants, and pajama pants. High schoolers go to school in pajama pants,” she said. As a person who often worse sweatpants to high school, let me strongly advice against boys trying this.

But there’s also a rise in skirt wearing. And not just for women. I’m completely in favor of men wearing skirts. They’re physically comfortable. They’re psychologically uncomfortable. And I’ve got great calves.

Joel Stein is the senior distinguished visiting fellow at the Joel Stein Institute. A former columnist for Time, the L.A. Times, and Entertainment Weekly, he is, amazingly, also the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You’re Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book and Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity. Follow him on Twitter,Facebook, Instagram, Friendster, or Google+.

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