Real Men Wear It Snug?

In an article for The Village Voice entitled "Real Men Wear It Snug", Corina Zappia says:

"Mick Jagger would never wear pantaloons. The scrawny-legged rock star is a totem of masculinity in skin-tight leggings. David Bowie, too, was a big fan of flaunting the twins. But it was really Iggy, our precious Iggy, who made the skintight rocker-jean a joy to behold. And then—poof!—every crotch-cuppin' pair of denim disappeared from the market. With the dawn of hip-hop, real men wore big, baggy, where's-the-beef jeans. Only fattened up country-singing losers like Garth and Clint sucked themselves into some ball-squeezing Wranglers (Southern-style birth control at its finest)."

Because I'm mostly in-and-around Seattle (i.e. Tac-Town, Tacompton), I get to see more than my share of ass-tight jeans on men. Only they aren't on country singers, they're on emo-hipster-scenesters. From Seattle to Tacoma these kids think that wearing all black, quoting Kerouac, and listening to The Velvet Underground makes them deep and unique. All ten thousand of them.

One notable fashion trend among these kids is, aside from the all-black, all-day, everyday thing... skinny jeans. Black skinny jeans, obviously. These jeans are certainly not a new concept to the fashion world, for fuckssake, but these kids think they invented them.

I own a pair of black skinny jeans, but they don't for one second inspire me to get the "emo forelock" (carefully eye-concealing long, black bangs) and then let my tears of agony drip slowly into my (black) coffee and saturate the pages of On The Road.

So what makes me so high and mighty? Well, I like skinny (pegged, stovepipe, drainpipe, cigarette... whatever you call them) jeans because they are classic. They are NOT the property of emo-hipster-scenesters. They are absolutely the property of Audrey Hepburn (watch Funny Face), Edie Sedgwick and all things Mod and Factory, Mick Jagger and all things rock 'n' roll.

They are a gender-neutral, international representation of iconic people in 20th Century fashion. They were not invented in Seattle for the sake of Capitol Hill emo-hipster-scenesters.

My friend Jordan asked me to write my thoughts about men wearing skinny jeans. Well, here is my succinct answer: I love skinny jeans on men, as long as the men wearing them aren't moping around coffee shops waiting to bum a cigarette off the first person they see, and in the meantime, you guessed it, crying into their black coffee.



(picture courtesy of newyorkmetro.com)