My Take On Fashion And The Fools Who Fall For It

I enjoy Esquire magazine. It was within its pages that I first became acquainted with Chuck Klosterman, the pre-eminent pop-culture journalist of my generation. It has some solid feature reporting and a fair dose of music and reviews. There are however, parts of the magazine that leave me shaking my head. Not in the sense that the articles are poorly written, but in the sense that I wonder what sort of D-Bag they appeal to.


For instance, this month, on page fifty is an overview of blue jeans. Fair enough. But after scanning this (lots of comments about “washes” and adjectives about the color “blue”) I remained stunned by two things; 1) the costs range from $195.00 to $285.00, and 2) the crux of the issue…who in the hell would spend that kind of money on blue jeans?

I had a similar feeling last year when my wife and I were in South Beach for a long weekend. (Travel Note: South Beach is a pretty cool place but $26.00 for a Heineken and a vodka tonic is overpriced unless it is being served alongside grapes that are being fed to me by Erin Andrews (see photo) in between wardrobe changes. However Emeril’s restaurant at the Lowes is the real deal.) Anyway, on the rare occasion Bonnie was in a store that sold men’s clothes, I would browse the racks that dangled shirts…none of which looked like they should be tucked in. Now, though this was nice merchandise, the least expensive shirt I found was in the neighborhood of $400.00. Four hundred fucking dollars! For a shirt. I was relaying this same story to my brother-in-law last week over beers and wings and I told him, “I cannot imagine if I was worth a billion dollars that I would feel anything but I was getting screwed if I paid that much money for a shirt.”

And this is really the point of the matter…if you spent two hundred bucks on a pair of jeans how can you not feel like you are getting screwed? More to the point maybe, if you did dole that cash over, what in the hell kind of statement are you trying to make? I guess there is this whole demographic out there who could pair those indigo, brushed, stretchy blend, whisker detail (all words in the article) jeans with a nice four hundred dollar linen, un-tucked shirt, sip a twenty dollar cocktail and feel good about themselves…or at least try to bury the vain, shallow existence they are most certainly living. Me, I’m having a Stoney’s Beer in my Levi’s and Old Navy T-Shirt and am feeling pretty good about the steak I am about to grill.