Fat Guy Fashion: I Guess I Wear Jeans Now

It's been so long I barely remember why I hated denim in the first place

The longer I live in New Jersey, the stronger my Springsteen powers become

I was 44 years old when I purchased my first pair of jeans. I had owned jeans in the distant past — the last time was during Operation Desert Storm — but I had never done the quintessentially American task of purchasing a pair of jeans.

It feels almost scandalous to admit that in a public forum. McCarthy blacklisted plenty of people for “unAmerican activities” during the Red Scare, and is there really anything more unAmerican than spending three decades of my life avoiding jeans? Levi Strauss lived the perfect version of the mythical American dream; only a true radical could hate on his signature creation.

Like with so many stories, the reality was more mundane — I simply thought they were uncomfortable. This may be the fault of the last pair of jeans I owned, which I vividly remember. My mother had brought me to the husky section (strike one) at Mervyn’s (strike two) to purchase a pair of black, acidwashed, Bugle Boy jeans (strike three). They had an elastic waist and ankles, so they were essentially an incredibly coarse and uncomfortable version of sweatpants. If I dig deeper into my memory banks, I think I liked them because they were more like the Zubaz and Hammer pants I preferred at the time (I was very cool).

Then, for reasons I cannot recall no matter how hard I try, I stopped wearing jeans completely. I wasn’t trying to make a statement, I wasn’t trying to be different, and, at least as far as I can remember, I wasn’t conscious that I was even avoiding jeans. I was a punk kid in high school in the ‘90s, wearing weird shit from the thrift store was the thing to do. I acquired a vast collection of hideously ugly, plaid Sans-a-Belt slacks and when my mom demanded I wear pants I could guarantee nobody had died in, I’d wear LL Bean corduroy pants. I’d eventually move on from being a walking fire hazard in scratchy polyester, but the cords stuck around.

This is the only picture I could find of me in jeans. This is somewhere in New Mexico in the early '90s. That cool little satchel on my belt is filled with rocks I found. Also, to prove my point, yes, I wear cords to the beach

For the last 20+ years, I have worn almost exclusively LL Bean cords. It started by being an easy thing to ask for at Christmas — it made me look responsible to ask for sensible clothes alongside a Dead Kennedys album — but eventually it just became the type of pants I would get when I needed pants. I knew the size I wore, so I never had to try anything on. It’s helpful that LL Bean has been selling the exact same pants since they invented corduroy around 200 AD at their Egyptian branch, so they were always available. It was just so goddamn easy to stick with the same thing for all this time.

And then a horrible thing happened — I lost weight. A lot of weight. To the point that I no longer had any pants that fit. Since I am both a) cheap and b) not of means to buy clothes I wear for less than five years, I’ve been trying to wait until the absolute last second before jumping down to another size. Basically, once the pants become so big that I can’t go half a block without pulling them up, and this is with my belt pulled as tightly as possible, it’s time to order a new pair.

Only this time, there was a snag I had never encountered over hundreds of pants-based transactions with my beloved Bean — they didn’t have my size. Worse than that, it was on backorder until the end of May! There was no way I was going to be able to keep wearing my current pair without becoming a half-nude menace to the community.