I was looking for a pair of normal jeans and not having much luck. So I went into the giant Levi shop (All Levis All The Time) filled with hope! Surely Levi would be able to deliver a pair of regular jeans.
Think again.
Fabric dark, cheap feeling, and like ever other jean product available on the market “stylishly” torn, big holes at knees or strange white blobs of wear on the legs in places that would never, naturally, get worn.
Or multiple peculiar holes all over, as if they’d been left hanging in some automatic weapons firing range and had been peppered good. Or both…
I look at the young clerk and confessed: “You know, I just feel it is my job to wear out my own jeans. It doesn’t seem right to have it contracted out to some machine or child laborer.”
He nodded sympathetically. (The customer is always right).
Yes, in my day we had active lives. We did stuff. We wore holes in our jeans without any outside help. Yep, not even from our disinterested non-helicopter parents.
Our jeans were authentic. Artisanal. Indeed the work was just about as local as you could get.
When you look at the language being used now to market and enhance our present possessions, foods and lifestyle, beneath the words, you can hear this wild, inchoate cry against the virtualness of much of our present existence: instant, effortless, convenient. But somehow insubstantial, unsatisfying.
Unearned.
Isabel Swift
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