Jeans

Before I tell you why denim jeans are the work of the devil I’ll tell you how I came to this conclusion. I believe it is incumbent upon writers to describe why they are insane for the sake of the people trying to make sense of their work, so I will do that here. In short, I may have overthought it a bit.

As a product of a non-literary family, I learned early in my life that I could adjust my behaviour according to the company I kept; I could watch the television at home and still sing falsetto in the church choir and be welcome in both places. I read Jennings and I watched The Generation Game. I also learned not to sing loudly at family weddings or christenings, although that one took me a while. I’ve sung quietly into my boots at all the funerals.

The overlap between the strands of my life that is relevant here is my English literature and language lessons at the provincial English Secondary Modern school I attended. Secondary modern is largely equivalent to ‘junior high’ in the colonies, although mine was a boy’s school. The reason English lessons became a difficult crossover is that they involved homework. Maths homework I could do without discussing anything with anybody, but my English teacher, a statuesque Greek American woman, had the idea that literature is something that should be discussed. You could tell she was Greek by her graduated tint glasses and chunky necklace. You could tell she was American because she liked talking about things (I would guess New York if asked). You could certainly tell that she was an English teacher.

I would like to make it clear that I blame nobody for the incident I am about to describe, it’s just stuff that happened and is useful in establishing my right to moan at great length about a perfectly harmless item of clothing. It’s going well so far.

Obviously, I’m not going to tell you my Greek-American English teacher’s name, but I will tell you that it earned her the nickname Yankee Knickers. Only the Y and the S are in the correct place in this abstraction, and S is already someone else, so for the purposes of this story ‘Y’ it is. At that age, I had yet to learn to check for rings so I will assume that she was using the only name she had, and will preface her initial with Ms.

I was probably fourteen, the second youngest pupil in my year, and I had joined the highest stream for English mid-year after having bought up the subject of Wodehouse in my previous class. I was among the sons of doctors and lawyers who felt that private education was wrong and so deprived their children of the gift of connections. I can vividly remember a particular peer whose contributions to class discussions were often prefaced by throwaway introductions such as ‘I was talking to Dad about this last night, and…’

I can’t remember a single one of the many endings to that beginning because I was always horrified by the time he got to ‘and’. I couldn’t imagine bringing up anything like that at home. There would have been a stunned silence and then a joke to cut the tension. This isn’t a criticism, my family is what they are, or should I say ‘was what they were’. My late father found it quite amusing if I was reading, and because I was probably reading Spike Milligan, so did I. Not all books are funny, however.

The book we were reading in class was That Was Then, This Is Now By S.E. Hinton and one morning we came across a potential talking point: The characters were described as wearing jeans: Ms. Y asked why we thought that was. In the passage we had just read several of the characters had scrambled over a fence. At that time I was far from obtuse and tended towards literal interpretations so I said that if they’d been wearing suits they’d have torn them.

Yankee Knickers, sorry Ms. Y, possibly annoyed that I’d ruined her blatant segue into a lesson in how America is a society built from the bottom up, told me that I had missed the point and that jeans were part of the American ideal and that this cultural influence had spread to Europe because of two world wars and one John Steinbeck.

I was loudly mocked for my ignorance by my peers for providing such a simplistic and obvious explanation: This was a difficult situation to be in for one who didn’t feel that he belonged where he found himself. Something had to feel my schoolboy wrath and at that time I had yet to turn on myself, so I’m afraid I’ve been taking it out on pantaloons de Nimes ever since. I’ve been challenged on my odd phobia many times and have sometimes failed to convince my accusers that I am not merely being a twat, so as an extremely pompous and vain person I decided that the easy way to win the argument in future would be to find a suitable narrative which could provide a framework for understanding me, in the same way that I did with tomato ketchup and the guitar plectrum. So that is what I did; I took what was the slightest of slights by my peers and whipped it into the following soufflé.

There are certain aesthetic considerations, and they do make a good point at which to start. A suit says that you have made an effort and jeans say that you deliberately have not. Why do we value not trying? There is a point to be made about vanity here too. While there are cheap jeans which are worn without thought and are thus safe from the following criticism, there are also collector jeans, and there are connoisseur jeans; when you wear either of these you’ve made it look as if you have not made an effort while having made a considerable effort. Bourgeois vanity. It gets worse; designer jeans are the work of Satan. Only Mephistopheles could have come up with such a cunning plan; take something of use to those who do all the work and sell it back to them at the price of a week’s labour.

Jeans are now about being seen to be better than others while pretending to be one of the people. Ours are the same but while mine are vintage; yours are cheap. Jeans as a fashion statement; where unfortunately the statement is still ‘I’m not a lawyer at heart’. Harley Davidson and every manufacturer of pickup trucks has used this as a cornerstone of their marketing for years and it even has a name; Levelling. However, the assumption that putting an aristocrat in a pair of jeans changes them into an everyman is bollocks. It doesn’t make them anything other than what they are but with trousers on. It wouldn’t turn them from a toff into an urchin any more than it would turn them into an indentured black person. Vanity, fancy, and privilege. Slavery chic.

Moving from psychology to politics; Jeans are an insult to working people. Factories are closed by those who collect vintage Levis. It’s not even real workwear, they’re not practical in all circumstances; there’s a reason why jeans are never a part of a lifeguard uniform or worn as part of a space suit. Soldiers don’t wear them if there’s no need for camouflage in a suburban coffee shop. Police officers have found it quite productive to wear them when they want to fit in among criminals. Everything works sometimes.

In political science they call this ‘cultural appropriation’. While I’m aware that there is a certain emotional charge attached to the concept it can’t be denied that it has happened. What we did with Jeans we did with jazz too when we took something that’s both authentically black and American and ruined it. On this occasion we gave it to the French, who only allowed it because Jazz was a neologism with no parallel in the romance languages. It must be said that the French did do quite a job with Jazz, taking something dark and smoky and producing something jaunty and colourful. Damn them.

Obviously I’m being an idiot here; actually more of a prick because I did it on purpose. Cultural appropriation is not always a bad thing if it’s done with an awareness of how these things came to be. The blues is here because life for poor black people was awful. It left a mark in culture which we should remember. We have Jazz because black people took their music to cities. Jazz and blues are gifts to human culture and can serve as a conduit to the study of social history. For this very reason I have, today, begun work on a new credo, which will lead me back to the path of accepting that I don’t have to create an elaborate philosophical narrative in order to put on a pair of trousers. Perhaps it’ll turn into a counter-narrative and defeat my fist narrative in battle, leaving me the victor. I’ll give it a paragraph and see how far I get.

There is an easy precedent which could yet see me in a pair of jeans: Sometimes cultures forget; do Australians still get upset when someone from another nation lights a fart? No. It’s become a cross-cultural way to end a dinner party now that we’re not allowed to smoke. Cultural appropriation is only a problem when it’s done without sensitivity and respect. If you get it wrong for a fundamental reason such as Monty Python putting prayer clobber on a bloke officiating at a stoning, or that bloke who went to music festivals wearing a Native American headdress, then you have made your subject lesser. Communities tell us to put a lid on that stuff because of how it diminishes them in the eyes of the world. If it doesn’t worry them then we should take that opportunity to add a little extra colour into shared culture. So that is my plan; if no one puts a strong objection to my doing so in the comments, or on my socials, I will, at an indeterminate time in the future, wear a pair of jeans. White ones.

I have published an audio version of this article at https://soundcloud.com/matthewbate/jeans?si=3d93b47d4f2e4775a8953c501a51796f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing