I don’t actually like wearing dirty clothes. I have this thing where I don’t want to sit on the nice furniture or whatever wearing my “grubbies”. For instance, I was wearing a pair of cut-offs this morning (yeah, when the knees blow out on my jeans, I retire them from wearing in polite company and turn them into work shorts) that have a lot of relatively faint grease stains from working on the cars. Now, these have been through the wash so I know they’re not gonna come off on the furniture, but I still have to mentally tell myself it’s okay to sit down on the couch. These $425 pants would give me the heebie-jeebies just wearing them inside.
But hey, if anybody wants a pair of authentic grease-stained pre-distressed cutoffs with a few fresh dots of white paint from this morning, let me know. Since they’re cutoffs and only half there, I think I can let 'em go for $200.
If people will pay for fake spray painted mud on their cars, then of course they’ll pay for fake mud on their fancy jeans. The ridiculous price isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Yes, that’s the fun part, where I actually start out with nice jeans. I mean sure, after a few months of use and abuse, they may start to look worn, but I love new jeans.
Reasonably priced new jeans? You can, but only if you buy wholesale. Even then, the moral cost of cheap textile labor might not be worth it. Gandhi was right: you gotta go DIY.
I have a secret strategy for acquiring high end outdoor clothing. My Dad is fairly wealthy, and is particular about the fit of his clothing. So he buys super high end clothing from Filson, Belstaff and Holland & Holland, and later decides that he doesn’t like the fit.
We wear the same sizes, and I am not as particular, so he is always giving me piles of outdoor clothes and boots. Also, his definition of “worn out” is roughly the same as my definition of “barely broken in”.
This allows me to dress several tiers above my normal station in life.
wtf, I make a lot of my own stuff, why the hell not jeans? Okay, @ugh, you’re on. I’ll meet you over in the Craft category, just as soon as I’m done with my current project.
It is an interesting take on the Easter Island problem of using up all of the available resources.
“All of the loamy soil ended up on our jeans” is as good as a reason as any, I suppose.
Or maybe like the way having a lawn was established as noble because nobles could own arable tracks of land that they didn’t even need to dedicate to food production because peasants.
All of these consumers don’t even need property to waste the earth. They just need an ass.
