From the editor: This page is dedicated to the Public Forum, where we publish opinions on public and social issues that affect the Malibu community and our readers at large.
What is going on here?
Clothing fashion is a subject in which I have minimal interest. I am content with clothing that is clean, comfortable and appropriate to the occasion, even if not “cool.” However, a newspaper article I recently read was the last straw. I now have to speak out on the subject of fashion, specifically “torn jeans.” The article described the high maintenance cost of preserving the disreputable look of torn jeans. Some wearers even have the tears stabilized by reinforcing them at a cost of $30 per inch. Since the jeans are so fragile, machine-washing risks disintegration. They must be hand washed or dry-cleaned!
I was at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica recently and looked at the windows of Abercrombie & Fitch. Languidly posed mannequins were wearing stained jeans with tears front and back. Inside the store were piles of these jeans all with the same tears and stains. Apparently they are produced from new jeans and then identically distressed. The torn jeans were selling for $150 to $200. The few new jeans in the store were priced at about half of that.
When I first saw obviously affluent young people wearing torn jeans I was pleased. I assumed they were making a socio-political statement: they would no longer slavishly keep abreast of current fashion but instead would abjure conspicuous consumption and make do with what they had -they would wear their clothing out. How naïve I was! I soon saw more torn than untorn jeans at Starbucks, Malibu Yogurt, Savon and Blockbuster Video. This was no indication of emerging social consciousness. Rather, jeans with torn knees and tears below the back pockets revealing a bit of buttock and splattered with stains had become popular fashion.
What is going on here?
There is much about current clothing fashion that I find unattractive though not offensive. This includes women’s shoes with stiletto toes (not just heels) that must damage the toes of the women who wear them and also could possibly injure passersby. I do not understand why a woman would want to wear clothing designed to reveal bra straps. I find unattractive the long “shorts” that are now so popular – the ones that end midway between the ankle and the knee and are festooned with unnecessary and unusable pockets. Also, I dislike low-slung, unhemmed pants dragging at the heels that uncover not only underwear but also backside décolletage. I can, however, accept women’s belly-baring clothing provided it is worn by a belly that deserves baring.
All of this is mere quibbling compared to my feelings about the torn jeans fashion phenomenon, which I find down right offensive. Why? Just think of what it signifies. Those who wear ragged clothing because they want to, not because they have to, are saying, “Look at me! Of course I can afford new clothes but I choose to wear these rags. Don’t I look cute?” What they are doing is slumming, plain and simple. In making their fashion statement by wearing pseudo-old clothing they are mimicking those who have no choice but to wear rags. Lemming-like, they are following Paris Hilton and her ilk off the precipice of conformity. Consider this irony: torn jeans are made and distressed in third world countries by workers wearing clothing distressed by real wear and tear.
What does it say about a society in which its young people (I don’t find many thirtysomething’s or older wearing this clothing) exhibit so little sensitivity concerning the degradation that results from poverty? What can they be thinking when they spend $200 for a pair of pants that belongs in the rag bin? It is no answer to say that the fashion industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that thrives on the changing whims of its customers and just gives the purchasing public what it wants. Nonsense! The fashion industry creates new styles continuously in order to obsolete yesterday’s and force you buy today’s styles. Is it too much to expect the fashion industry mavens and their fashionista customers to evidence some degree of social sensitivity? Is it too much to expect them to not use poverty, one of society’s great ills, as a theme for a fashion statement? Are they so inwardly directed and obsessed with their own appearance that they lose sight of the fact that so much of the world’s population is in rags?
Shame on them!
Henry Pollard