Puh-leeeze!

This past Memorial Day weekend I spent most of three days assisting my wife at her booth at the New Mexico Wine Grower's Festival, held at the Southern New Mexico State Fair Grounds. As always, I mostly just watched the crowd. You see all kinds of people at this sort of event, and most seemed like good folks just out to enjoy perfect weather over a holiday. But, sometimes their choice of attire, and how they wear it, taxes the patience of this old man.

I have been wearing "jeans" for about 57 years. When I reported for duty at my first radio job, in July of 1949, I was mightily embarrassed because my luggage did not arrive on the same bus I rode into that small New Mexico town. My new employer, a woman named Beulah Shirk, was a jewell. She said, "Don't worry about it. This is the 'Land Of Mañana'. Just go buy yourself a pair of Levis and you'll be fine." So, I went to a dry goods store and bought a pair of blue denim pants.

When I wore them into the station, the boss looked at me in surprise and said: "Those are not Levis... they are gardner's pants!" Oops! Back to the dry goods store for the purchase of a pair of Levis 'Shrink to Fit' 501 jeans (price: $2.65). Actually I didn't hear them called 501s until a number of years later, but they are my jeans of choice to this day.

After so many wearings - especially if you are active in the outdoors - you end up with a rip or a tear here and there. The knees are often one of the first places to go. Once they are torn, denim jeans fray, and look tacky. For all these years, a rip in the knee was a signal to amputate the legs of the jeans and turn them into a pair of cut offs. Continuing to wear torn jeans was not cool.

But, alas, something happened along the way. Affluent young people - mostly those who did not actually work for their affluence, suddenly wanted to look poor and deprived. So, continuing to wear frayed jeans became some sort of status symbol.

Now, most of these kids have not done anything strenuous in their jeans (no longer Levis... but some designer brand which probably cost their parents about $80.) so there are no naturally obtained rips or tears. How to look cool? They cut their jeans, then wash them a couple of times so they will fray.

Trouble is, they've never owned a pair of "honestly" worn and torn jeans, so they don't know how to fake it. I saw two different teenage girls who had cut a neat, rectangular hole in the knees of their jeans. After a couple of washings, these openings were a little frayed, but not enough to disguise the perfectly cut openings.

I wanted to ask these girls what sort of work would create these neat, rectangular holes in the knees of their jeans. But, aside from being silly, these girls seemed like nice people, and I just didn't have the heart to embarrass them.

My advice? Check out some really poor kids' jeans if you want to learn how to fake your jeans to make you look authentically poor and deprived.