Skinny jeans are not cool, they've ruined my life
Skinny jeans are a horrible modern invention. They are, if you stick with me for a bit here, a morality play set in contemporary times. It starts all nice and cozy, and you're tricked into believing that actions don't always need to have consequences. That's Act One.
It's all downhill from there though. The jeans are supposed to remind you that life sucks and everything can fall apart at any given instant, so you might as well be dreadfully uncomfortable while you wait for the inevitable. Even the process of trying them on is an overdramatised theatrical mini-production in itself.
From a distance, the jeans don't look all that terrible (although nothing ever does from afar). You think: hmmm, maybe I'll give this a shot.
The fact that you're supposed to get one size larger than your actual waist size should be a big fluttering red flag, but no one pays any attention to that. You walk to the trial room and the fabric seems all glazy and refined.
Getting them on is slightly tedious, but you realise it's not as bad as you'd imagined. The top, the waist area, is loose and roomy so it seems like a comfortable fit. But that's just a mirage.
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| Beware of the skinny jeans. |
Around the knees is where the voodoo happens. They're unreasonably clingy and unyielding and refuse to let go - an albatross around your waist. Skinny jeans, the sartorial equivalent of the walls caving in, will suffocate you into submission sooner or later. It's when you realise the only way you can leave is by buying them and walking out from the store in that very pair. But there's a lot that goes into getting the consumer inside that room. The amount of advertising being chucked at you from multiple angles to convince you of their value is extravagant.
They're fashionable, they're hip, they're trendy, they're chic and stylish, everyone's wearing them, so you must as well.
Even rappers, tastemakers and forever the signifiers of where modern fashion trends are going to head because of the innate coolness of hip-hop music, have ditched their floating baggy jeans - remember FUBU and Wu Tang? - adopting skinny jeans as their trouser of choice.
By default, the coolness of an item of clothing goes up markedly once it gets the endorsement of modern rappers. --
As for me, I own a solitary pair of fairly uncool jeans. Recently, that pair was due its annual wash so I decided to buy a new one. But not skinny jeans, nope.
I was in the market for a pair of simple, regular, straight-fitting blue jeans (spoiler alert: it's impossible).
I tried everywhere: malls around the country, big stores, franchises, small shops, e-commerce, underground markets, and smuggled items in a back alley garage. I tried everything: Levi's, Lee, Flying Machine, Wrangler, Spykar, all of them. But their very existence has been artfully expunged.
The only non-skinny jeans you get these days will be "stonewashed" and pre-faded like it's still 2002.
Or they'll have like this bright neon stitching that glows in the dark. Or they'll be velvety, glossy, leathery, hideous.
They've obliterated the colour blue as well. Instead, you'll have blue-purple, blue-gold, metallic blue, blaze-blue, razzle-dazzle-blue, orange, glitz-green, psychedelic-amber. Even auburn and chocolate and honey-cyan. But no blue.
It sounds like bad luck, a reason to try harder and look elsewhere. But what's going on is far more sinister than that. The employee helping you out at the store is trained to hand you one rubbish overpriced item after another, pretending like he doesn't understand what "plain", "blue", "straight", and "normal" mean.
Eventually, he'll pawn you off to the next guy. That next guy will impatiently offer you the option of ditching your plan of buying jeans altogether. He'll suggest you try out something called "chinos", which are basically shit-coloured cotton pants that cost just as much.
All of this is a cleverly designed step-by-step ploy intended to break your spirit. It's when I finally flipped. I grabbed the guy's collar and yelled at him.
I insisted I wanted to buy a new pair of normal jeans. I couldn't, at that point, care how much they cost. That's Act Three, where all the action happens, and then the descent begins.
The plan reaches fruition. The salesman will softly, almost reluctantly, tell you to check out the new pair of skinny jeans they have. "Try toh karlo, sir. Naya hai."
Exhausted in body and mind, the customer will wearily grab on to whatever the guy hands him, and head to the trial room against better judgment. It's what I did.
Now, my calves are burnt from the friction; my hamstring is sprained; my ankles are swollen; my head feels heavy.
I'm still a little dizzy, and my breathing is laboured. I can't eat proper food just yet, but I have graduated to a diet of semi-solids, so there's a lot of khichdi and sweet corn soup inside me right now. I still get Nam flashbacks.
As for my pride? Well, it's hurt too.