On good days, I could convince myself I looked like the owner of an offbeat vinyl bar in Tokyo that’s only open on Tuesdays. On bad days, which were most of them, I looked like Michael Jordan in the off season. My body wasn’t meant for this. The clothes were wearing me.
Thankfully, the hegemony of Clown Couture seems to have relaxed a bit. On the rack of public opinion, there is now a tiny sliver of space for the Regular Millennial Guy Look. I don’t have to dress like an asshole anymore. What was passe just a few years ago is now vintage—evergreen menswear vocabulary. Whatever the reason for this, dayenu. It’s starting to feel like the good old days again, back when we wore clothes and not the reverse. Back when we could walk around downtown without tiny children popping out with tiny microphones asking us how much our outfits cost. Back when genies were happy living in bottles.
Do we really want to go back? Truthfully, I never wore actually skinny jeans or, in the words of writer Jay Kang, “cockblasters.” I dabbled in Diesel, but drew the line at denim with elaborate rips or embroidery, webbed spandex in the knees, oddly placed utility pockets, zippers that didn’t open, that kind of thing. Cheap Mondays made my legs look like sausages. The rise on certain Tsubis had me slinging more crack than Ronald Reagan. Everybody makes mistakes. It’s important to forgive yourself. But while it’s natural to look for a shortcut on your way to Denim Valhalla, I promise you nothing is more sinful than “pre-distressed.”
But those APC Petit Standards in the mirror… There is poetry in selvedge. You’re choosing the road less traveled. You’re saying you’re the kind of person who puts in the work. Back in the day, every January, I journeyed down to the APC store in Soho to buy what would be the only pair of pants I’d wear for an entire year. The fabric was so stiff and the friction so ferocious that broad swaths of hair follicles on my thighs, calves, and hamstrings would eventually die forever. Day by day, the jeans relaxed a little bit more, slowly conforming not just to my anatomy but to my lifestyle, the places I went, the things I carried. My jeans were my skeleton, my shadow, my dancing partner. There’s a reason you don’t see much vintage APC secondhand. We wore each other into oblivion.
For many of you, this may be the first time in your life that wearing pants that fit is a viable fashion option. Pluck the day. I should warn you about one complication, though. Washing selvedge: You don’t. Maybe it was clever copy or maybe it was urban legend a la Marilyn Manson’s rib removal, but I firmly believed that the only way to wash selvedge denim was to walk them into the ocean. Putting them in the freezer for the night could work in a pinch, but there’s no way around the inevitable. What you need to know is that these jeans will push on the bladder, and by the fall they will smell like the bathroom at a minor league baseball stadium.
When my then-girlfriend (now wife) discovered this, she begged me to let her wash my jeans. The smell was just too much for her, she said. It made her not want to be close to me. Eighteen years and a 22-month-old later, it’s the only real fight I’ve ever had with her. In the store last week, handing over my credit card, I could see the question in her eyes: “Are you going to wash these?” Young reader, I died for fashion in ways I no longer can afford to. Give the ocean my best.
