The single most useful addition to the fashion panoply of fame in the history of the universe is the mighty pair of jeans. Supplanting doublets, frock coats, lederhosen (especially lederhosen), dinner jackets, woolly jumpers and even tee shirts the denim jean reigns supreme. In the seventies I thought a pair of Stubbies came close but how naff do they look 11% of the way through the twenty first century? Jeans are the business; they were decades ago and they still are now. I would wear a pair of jeans as my only form of trousering for everything if I could. Dress codes on golf courses and at work dictate that I can't. Well they are daft but the work bit can be fudged at the weekends. Restaurants that don't allow jeans don't get my custom - up themselves plonkers.
I bought my first pair of jeans in 1967, I think. I know I bought them from Lichtenfields in Kingston upon Thames (opposite Bentalls where Eric Clapton and I used to buy our records); a gentlemen's outfitters that has long since bitten the dust. I would like to think there was considerable parental opposition to such a radical purchase but I don't think I was given that rebellious satisfaction. In 1967 I bought a pair of Levis 501s; I have never bought anything else. When the Dave Clark Five were the popular music ensemble of the moment the only choice one had in the jeans department was Levis or Wranglers. Ford or Holden. Shimano or Penn. Levis for me.
It used to be the only choosing you had to do. Walk into a shop and say 'A pair of Levis, please', part with the cash and walk out with the dark blue vestments. Then it started getting a bit harder. Lee Cooper, Lee and other Johnny Come Latelys arrived. No problem. 'A pair of Levis, please', part with the cash......... Then it got really hard when Levis came out with different models. 504, 604, (the 604 was a trolley bus when The Dave Clark Five were in their pomp) 735 or something. These numbers represented different styles. There's baggy, tight (and I mean have them sewn onto your legs tight) even, I think, flared. A temporary hiccough in the jean buying habits but as soon as you grasped the fact that real jeans with straight legs and button flies were called Levis 501s you were right. So it became 'A pair of Levis 501s please', part with the cash........
Jeans are comfy; there is no other sort of trousering that is even worth considering for a long plane journey (except perhaps track suit bottoms but pullease). Jeans are hard wearing. I've never taken a pair of mine to Magdeburg and tried to pull them apart with teams of horses but they are, in my experience, indestructible until they finally fall apart. In fact this has never happened to me as I have never been patient enough to wait the fifteen years of daily use until this happens. Jeans look good. I change mine after three or four years when they start to look a bit tatty. Now here is the problem. My idea of tatty does not, apparently, coincide with Levi Strauss's idea of tatty.
Tatty for me is when they bottom hem starts fraying because you've been intermittently walking on it for a couple of years. Tatty is when they fade so much and selectively that the front of the thighs is a different colour and you can see the outline of your wallet in your left hand pocket even when your wallet is on the kitchen table. Tatty is when the tops of the pockets start fraying.
Now I knew that the youth of today (vide supra Lichtenfields circa 1967) thinks all these tattyness indices are desirable and you can now buy jeans that look like this from 'new'. You shell out one hundred and sixty slides for a pair of faded, fraying trousers. If you pay extra you can even buy them with holes in the knees. Well don't you try that sort of bollocks with me.
But they did. I went into 'Just Jeans' yesterday (golf was cancelled for precipitation reasons) a new pair of 501s to purchase. This was a grave error. They weren't playing the Dave Clark Five for openers. The bird selling the trou had more metallurgy on display than a well stocked engineering shop. No matter. 'A pair of Levis 501s please'. I was handed a pair of blotchily faded, frayed replicas. 'No, not these. Real, brand new ones'. 'These are what we sell these days' was the reposte. I could see her just managing to repress the 'Grandad' suffix. Well not to me you don't. I walk out in the highest of high dudgeons.
Sat down in the middle of the mall and looked around for a trouser counsellor. The habits of forty years, a central pillar of my existence shattered by a spotty, pierced slip of a girl. What was I to do? My wife suggested a pragmatic but difficult solution. Buy another brand. No, not possible. I can't go to the dark side. But I did.
New jeans are a pair of Rodd & Gunns. Made in China. Look OK; no look good, but I didn't say that. Sort of comfortable; well very comfortable, but I didn't say that. I am a shattered man, though.
I'm going to Europe in a couple of months. I think I'll drop into Magdeburg and hire a few horses for half an hour.
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