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No way! Your butt looks terrible, and they're trying way too hard. They're so Hollywood actor-stylist-victim. Please take them off!" These were the words effortlessly tumbling forth from my wife Julie's authoritative, pretty, and unfiltered mouth when we recently found ourselves in a high-end jeans boutique. And you know what? She was right. And with that shot across the stern, a great odyssey into the black heart of blue jeans was under way.
Recently, I've been on a reconnaissance mission to find out what is really up with the tapered, the rare, the archetypal, the vintage, the seventies boot cut, the eighties peg leg, the small-batch, and the above-all, over-fetishized staple of staples: the dungaree, the blue jean. I can tell you that I am uniquely qualified because I wear one type of jean and I wear them 355 days a year—unwashed Levi's 501s, because I'm six foot six and they come in my size, 34 x 40. I wear bathing trunks the other 10 and a quarter days.
For this I have been refused service at "21." I have been the trigger point of family rifts. I have been complimented, and I have been scorned. I also, as you probably do too, watch Led Zeppelin DVDs at home and make fun of Robert Plant's pocketless girlie jeans as much as I drop my jaw at John Bonham's beats. To me and many of my friends, jeans are essential and classic clothing items. So what's all the obsessive fuss and expense about?
My first stop was the new Levi's store on Fourteenth Street that looks exactly like a Ralph Lauren outpost (which, interestingly, was obviously based on the Levi's Marlboro Man aesthetic in the first place). This is what I was told: "It's all about dark jeans, as people are using them for daywear and sneaking them into the office." There is still, however, a prevailing ersatz "wear" fixation—people seem to want their jeans worn out for them, and that work is usually done by as many as 15 people performing closely guarded alchemical rituals consisting of chemical baths, sanding, and, for all I know, the sacrificial slaughter of a small animal.
Levi's Vault Pieces, retailing for $501 a pair (get it?), is perhaps the ultimate expression of this curious luxury phenomenon. The company's archives in San Francisco have—no surprise—the largest and most comprehensive collection of blue jeans in the world. Every year, Levi's designers pick an inspirational piece from their collection, going back as far as the 1870s, and then re-create it in a limited run, all exactly the same, down to the holes, ripped belt loops, and oil stains. Think about this for a minute: Fifteen people, thousands of miles away, screw up your jeans the exact same way a guy who's been dead for 100 years wore them out.
