Now that people are venturing back out from their pandemic bunkers and into the wider world, the concept of fashion has once again reared its stylish head.
“What a great fashion trove you have here!” exclaimed my friend. She had come over to help me sort some of my belongings into a bag for charity.
“Please tell me what you mean because I’ve never been fashionable in my life,” I answered.
“Well, just look at the news — ripped and torn blue jeans are all the rage. Today’s fashion icons are wearing jeans so full of holes and rips that they barely qualify as clothing at all. So you’re in luck.”
My eyes drifted over to the bed, where we had piled quite a stack of blue jeans. It’s true, I have a lot of ripped and torn blue jeans in my personal collection. But somehow, even with all the sandpapered and acid-washed and worn-to-a-frazzle things you can see people wearing, nobody has yet sported my own personal look.
I have yet to see Kim Kardashian in a pair of jeans that are still intact everywhere except where her thighs rub together.
Even when I was skinny, that was the only place my jeans wore out. I remember wearing one particularly disheveled pair to work one day at Channel 13. I was scheduled to be doing desk work, nowhere near the studio — just finishing up some expense reports and throwing out old files. Might as well be comfortable, I figured.
But that day, our receptionist had called in sick, and suddenly I was instructed to meet one of that day’s guests at the elevator and bring them back to our offices. Oh well, I told myself, at least my jeans look OK while I’m standing up.
Then the elevator doors opened to reveal a war veteran in a wheelchair, whose field of vision was therefore right at crotch-level! I hope he didn’t think I was rude, but there was no way I was going to stay in his line of sight; I stayed well behind the relative who was pushing his chair.
That day was the source of my rule, “Never go to work in anything you couldn’t wear to greet a guest in a wheelchair.”
Suddenly, a different picture took over my mind: an adorable little pair of “Baby’s First Blue Jeans.” They were the first jeans I ever bought for my baby boy.
I used to wonder why the thrift shops had every other item of clothing except boys’ pants. I soon learned the answer after my little whirlwind had worn holes in both knees.
My first experience with iron-on patches was fixing the knees on those little pants. (The patches were almost the size of the entire outfit.) But all too soon, the patches themselves needed patching. I may even have tried patching them for the third and final time, before I realized it would be a lot less trouble to just buy that child some new clothes.
I stored those little pants in the attic somewhere — if only to prove that once upon a time, I knew how to sew. Because from that day forward, I haven’t bothered to patch or sew anything——except hemlines that unravel and threaten to trip people on their way out the door to a job interview.
As for my raggedy blue jeans, I think even Kim Kardashian would agree that you have to be able to close your jeans’ zipper, no matter how artistically shredded they are everywhere else.
And that’s why my friend helped me put three garbage-bags-full of old blue jeans on my porch at the end of the day. Kim, they’re all yours if you can get here before the Big Brothers Big Sisters truck comes in the morning.