I’ve often heard the phrase “nostalgie de la boue” applied to our contemporary intelligentsia, but I never thought it would surface in quite so literal a manner.
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Thanks! Now I have “Dream Operator” running through my head.
“Shopping is a feeling.
Sometimes I get a wobbly feeling.
I have a commercial feeling.
…There ought to be a law”
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From an essay by Scott Alexander:
“Consider a group of people separated by some ranked attribute. Let’s call it “class”. There are four classes: the upper class, the middle class, the lower class, and, uh, the underclass.
Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.
But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.”
By this argument, middle class people would never wear these jeans, because the could be seen as lower or underclass. But upper class people could wear them, because it would be seen as a fashion statement.
If you agree with Mr. Alexander’s logic.
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i will sell my grease stained, frayed, muddy jeans to anyone for $35
to allow me to buy NEW jeans.
I’m not gonna kid ya, I pay ~ $16/pair
Dickies duck utility in black
https://www.sportsmansguide.com/product/index/dickies-mens-duck-utility-carpenter-pants-slight-irregulars?a=1944911
I have 4 pair, wear them almost daily. one observant friend at work asked “do you ever change pants?” - - she was asking in a kind way, so I explained I had 4 pair. ----- “why not 5, one for each weekday?” ---- because I do laundry
when they are wore out? I will sell them to any rich person wanting to look bedraggled.
when people are so rich they pay to look dirty? we need a damn revolution.
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This is not only ridiculous, it’s also pretty maddening. This bourgeois obsession with “working class authenticity” as a fashion element is disgusting, degrading, and an absolute “fuck-you” to people who can barely afford a pair of jeans in general.
The bourgeoisie is presently obsessed with the idea of humanizing themselves and making it seem like they’re “not so different from everyone else.” It’s a transparent ploy because they know that sooner or later people are going to realize that there’s a lot more of us than there are of them, and we’re getting pretty sick and tired of being stepped on…
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Wonder how much a distressed dhoti will go for.
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I don’t know many bourgeois people (by the standard definition) or members of the “contemporary intelligentsia” who can afford to shell out that kind of money for this ridiculous product.
The confusion in terms is understandable. David Brooks, as part of his core mission of making those selfish Baby Boomers who abandoned the ideals of their youth for Reaganism feel better about themselves, coined the term “bourgeois bohemian” to serve a number of intellectually dishonest ends. But what he was really describing were yuppies who were members of the top economic 10% back then purchasing “authenticity”.
Let’s be clear: the market for these $425 jeans is not made up of middle-class people or academics or creative class types seeking to purchase authenticity but rather wealthy people who have enough disposable income to play at being poor. It’s real Hameau de la Reine stuff, rightly maddening to you.
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I find it reassuring that people who have all the money in the world nonetheless envy those who earn an honest living.
And what distinguishes the uber-rich, old money types from the merely upper class or nouveau riche is that they have nothing to prove. They’re the ones showing up in polo shirts when everyone else is wearing Armani. Not having to display your wealth is the ultimate display of wealth.
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I don’t really see it as envy as much as having enough wealth and status to be able to play at the appearance of dirt or worn clothing in the most superficial sense possible.
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Sure, but they wouldn’t be motivated to do it unless they experienced a lack of authenticity in their own lives. They live in luxury, but deep down they know they don’t deserve it, so they assume the appearance of those who do. Style choices are all about what you feel is lacking in your life:
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Jeez, I just paid to have my guitar de-loused. I’d hate to bring it to one of these places to make it look more authentic, just to find bugs in the body again!
I feel like the kind of person this appeals to is the sort of person for whom this sort of thing below is the height of fashion. Not gonna name names, but it starts with K and ends with either -ardashian or -anye.
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Exactly. That polo shirt, by the way, may not have a label on it but probably cost more than $150 back when the father of the person wearing it first bought it. That’s because the real thing that kind of old money buys one is the ability to show one DGAF about things like fashion if one is so inclined.
Which brings me to another always-welcome opportunity to quote the late and much-missed Terry Pratchett:
When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.
He’d learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.
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Honestly, that’s not so crazy. People with more money than they know what to do with are a growing market in this economy, and the way to appeal to them is to add a zero onto your price and pretend that your thing is the luxury version of what everyone else is paying a fraction for, and that all their friends are buying from you.
Oh for the love of gods the number of hypocrites here.
Have any of you purchased stonewashed, acid washed or distressed jeans in the last 50 years?
Congratulations. You, like millions of poor and rich alike, bought jeans that were meant to look old and worn just like these.
You can buy a pair of f’ing patched, distressed and acid washed jeans from Old Navy for $20. So enough with this idea that this is just some obsession by the rich to look working class. This has been an on again off again part of fashion for literally 50 years.
But if you want to insist on this, why don’t we talk about how awful all those apparently rich poseurs that apparently made up the entire 80s punk scene were for trying to look working class? Oh the horror.
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I think there’s quite a big difference between buying denim that’s already been ‘broken in’ – for comfort reasons as well as aesthetic – and denim that’s covered in fake mud. Very few people want to wear jeans made of rough, stiff denim, which is why stone washing and acid-washing is very popular. But $425 jeans dyed/painted with artificial mud don’t strike you as something inherently for poseurs?
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Which I am pretty sure was just ripped off of Zoolander’s Derelicte
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The fake mud is done for aesthetic purposes just like intentionally tearing jeans was done for aesthetic purposes in the 80s. The point is to make it look like you live in a pair of jeans. That’s always been the point.
And acid washed jeans weren’t any more “broken in” from a comfort standpoint than non-acid washed jeans. They were simply superficially damaged. A pair of regular Lee jeans in the 80s were just as soft as the acid washed ones (which is to say… not particularly soft).
Fact is, fashion often starts at the high end and works its way down quickly. In a couple years, I fully expect to see mud washed jeans at Old Navy.
Fact is, these aren’t even the first mud washed jeans. They’ve been around for years.
I think that’s the point though. A working class person who wears “muddied jeans” is just that. The look can’t be escalated to couture until it is worn by someone who unequivocally is not wearing them out of necessity.
Sometimes it does work in the reverse, like punk or grunge, as you mentioned above. But Trompe l’oeil dirt is different, in my opinion.
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