Fashion  /  PotD

The Comfort of Home


September 1, 2015
charles i. letbetter - the comfort of home

That Trick With The Hay (2012) Model: Olivia Ogden. Studio Assistance: Keith Dellinger

All fashion brands are about looking good. Being Human is also about doing good. And you can do good by the simple act of slipping into a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. —Salman Khan

For all the talk about how fashionable jeans are in contemporary society, they never have stopped being practical and it is still in those callus-inducing, sweat-producing, life span-reducing jobs that denim is most at home. Whether down on the farm, in the middle of an oil field, or on the factory floor, jeans are standard attire and wearing much of anything else just makes one look a bit silly. These are the tasks for which denim was made and when one steps away from the pre-washed, pre-shrunk, pre-demolished wannabe’s with their expensive price tags one finds that a good $40 pair of Levi’s is just as fit for the job today as it was in 1850.

As hard as it may be to believe, it wasn’t all that long ago that respectable people just didn’t wear their jeans away from their workplace. Growing up in rural areas of Kansas and Oklahoma, jeans were part of almost everyone’s wardrobe, but you didn’t dare wear them to school until they became popular in the mid-70s, and even then changing the dress code was a big deal. One didn’t wear jeans to church; that was just disrespectful. One could wear jeans to the diner for lunch because you were on a break from work, but not to the restaurant for dinner. Jeans were for home, for playtime, for work, but not for socializing.

Possibly one of the biggest victories for the normalization of denim came with the election of Jimmy Carter to the White House. A peanut farmer by trade, Mr. Carter was accustomed to wearing jeans just about everywhere he went in the small town of Plains, Georgia, except for church. So, upon his arrival in Washington he promptly declared blue jeans to be acceptable attire in the White House anytime protocol did not demand otherwise. This upset a lot of people who felt that jeans were simply too casual and one of the first things Mr. Reagan did after his inauguration was to make the White House dress code more formal. One might project that the nation hasn’t felt relaxed ever since.

Jeans are still most at home in places one needs the protection of heavy cotton twill.  Even now, my jeans are the favorite part of my wardrobe. They know me, they have adapted to my strange body form, they bend where I need them to bend, and most importantly, the cats have difficulty getting their claws through the fabric. While there are still places I won’t wear denim, when I’m home and still need to wear pants, chances are I’m going to be in jeans. It just wouldn’t feel like home without them.



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