forever in bluejeans

I had a flashback to college the other day.

After work I changed into jeans to head out to dinner; it was chlly and damp, so I decided to wear my newest jeans, the ones I just bought from Old Navy that are tight all the way down, with boots over them. (Being able to wear boots over them is, in fact, a major reason I wanted jeans that are tight all the way down.) I put on the jeans, then my socks. Then I went to pull up the socks and realized I couldn’t; even with the stretch denim, I couldn’t scrunch the jeans high enough to get my socks all the way up.

This used to be a fact of life for me. I began junior high, aged 11, in 1978 right when styles in jeans were transitioning from straight-legged or bell-bottomed to tight all the way to the ankle. For several years, my major fashion grievance was that, because I wasn’t big enough to wear juniors sizes, I had to wear pre-teens or something called “student size” (same thing but unisex) which only cmae with straight legs. I suppose this was someone’s idea of keeping styles age-appropriate, which in general I approve of (now). However, at 11 I was in 7th grade. I’d been on dates, I wore eyeshadow and lipgloss with my mother’s approval (largely, I think, because she trusted me to apply it subtly as I preferred that look anyhow) and whatever shape I had (i.e. linear) was going to be shown as much with the straight-legged jeans as with the tighter ones I coveted, because the difference was mostly from the knees down.

As soon as I could fit into a size 2, somewhere in high school, I began wearing my jeans tight, and the style continued through my college years. I got into the habit of putting on my socks before my pants. During my sophomore year I roomed with P, who was apparently less driven by fashion than I was. I remember being shocked once, when we were about to go out somewhere, when she hauled up her cuffs and pulled up her socks. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “You can do that? Wow.”

(For reference, P had a calm sense of herself and a natural magnetism that made her far more popular with guys in college than I ever was – even though I had the advantage of being a female engineering student. I don’t know whether the self-assurance was the direct cause of the magnetism (probably) but I think it did account for her willingness to choose her jeans for comfort rather than trendiness. Not that I was ever exactly a fashion plate, anyway.)

A few years after college, the general silhouette changed; I’m not speaking of ephemeral fashion trends here, but of the basic silhouettes that change a lot more slowly. Shirts became more fitted; jeans became looser, first straight-legged and then flared and even bell-bottomed. The widest of those didn’t stay in any longer than they did the first time, but less extreme flares have had much more staying power. When I first tried on a pair of straight-legged jeans I had flashbacks then, too – they were the same cut I’d used to wear in my student-sizes days, before I could buy tighter jeans. Only they were more comfortable than the older ones had ever been, because they were cut to fit around the hips I have now (at 13 I couldn’t fit into juniors sizes yet, but I was just a tiny bit too curvy for unisex jeans to be completely comfortable) and because, blessedly, in the elapsed time stretch denim had come far enough to be something you’d actually want to wear rather than the nasty cheap-looking, harsh-feeling stuff it had been when I was a preteen and teenager.

Even more important, low waists had come in. What I hadn’t realized, during all those years of jeans so tight I had to lie down to zip them up, was that since I was both very short and quite short waisted, all those jeans meant to hit at the natural waist were actually much higher on me than they should have been, and were presupposing a tiny curved waist that I’ve never had and never will have. Lower-waisted jeans are much more likely to hit me in the exact right spot andat least if not the waist is wider than it needs to be in stead of narrower, and that’s what belts are for.

You can still tell how denim jeans percolated into society. Most of the oldest people I know, if they wear jeans, never quite seem comfortable in them. At the next generation down, there’s a transition. The most formal or most professional people still don’t seem at home in jeans; the least formal generally do, and there’s a lot of variation in the middle. In that age and social group, more men seem to be comfortable in what I think of as “real” jeans than women (that is more or less traditional styling, as opposed to elastic waists, lighter-weight fabrics, looser or trouser fits and so on, the stylings that were, I think, designed to hook people who weren’t otherwise comfortable in them.) That’s not surprising; when my mom was young, girls could wear jeans for play but not for school and not for any important occasion. For me, jeans were always OK for any time you didn’t have to dress up, and even in my memory, occasions requiring dressing up have become rarer. There are certainly people my age and younger who aren’t comfortable in them, but I think for people both any time after the late 1950s or so, that’s just individual preference rather than any societal movement. People I’ve known who are, say, 50 or younger who don’t like wearing jeans have found that some people are surprised by that; it’s one of those expected things ‘everybody” does, so those who don’t get asked, sometimes annoyingly and intrusively, why not.

I’ve worn jeans all my life, and because I do find them comfortable, I probably always will. I choose styles for comfort at least as much as for looks now, but the looks of what’s available to buy does change over time. As the particulars change, now that I’m getting old enough to have seen styles go around a few times, it’s kind of pleasant when a new-old style brings up old memories.