Denim

(unless you are an agricultural laborer)

“God’s favorite fabric. Part of the American Toga.

It's inviting, accessible, and often cheap. It’s the indigo flag of the American century. Originally a French fabric, Denim has become emblematic of a certain lifestyle and a particular perspective on life. We take issue with the cloth for its apex position in the fashion system, and the expression bottleneck its presence creates. Denim’s dominance flattens the public imagination, which greys the world. A Disney weave.

Jeans have bewitched the public, and the fashion industry uttered the spell. The mental yarn tying the indigo to the Old West, to a rugged and wild masculinity, is well and densely spun. You might balk that its legitimate origins are obscured and betrayed by consumer marketing, but that's just part of the ruse. Dusty cowpokes? Dirty miners? Outlaws? It’s all fake. Jeans purport to articulate something real but for all the noise, in most cases say absolutely nothing at all. Their voice is suffocated by the weight of their lies. NO other fabric boasts so forcefully of the legitimacy of its lineage, but one look reveals it descends from bit stock! Dismiss suburban adoption as a modern fluke, a historical eddy along the immortal twin Indigo rivers which should flow on, defining manhood forever. But please understand the whole story of its heritage is a construction. Cowboys never wore denim (it remains unclear whether they ever existed at all).

Enthusiast circles are fetish cults preserving the rituals of a dead god. They solemnly observe denim’s flooded mass appeal but refuse to discard it. There’s some value in this effort to renew and recontextualize, but it remains a cough against the gale of commerce. Where there could be said to be good jeans, they invariably appear thanks to these freaks.

Meanwhile the majority population has been duped into wearing ill-fitting, stiff-wearing garbage. In jeans can be seen the most morbid manifestations of the persistent fit issues plaguing the entire fashion world today. If you can’t see the fit issues during this wide-fit era, just wait another 3-4 years until the skinnies are exhumed and hung out to desiccate in the window racks of GU and Gap. Only around one tenth of the population can wear such a style comfortably and even fewer can wear it stylishly. In youth circles the trend to wear the jeans below the buttocks points to a retarded development. That so many would attempt to sport these styles is evidence of an ill society. Trend forecasting firms have finished probing the arcane depths of the consumer psyche; now all colors you see on a runway have been predetermined 2 years in advance, the fabrics by a year and a half, and the silhouette by 6 to 10 months. The state of street fashion suggests these forecasters abuse their magic for evil.

Broadly, we cannot cross the waters and find the other shore, and our culture is emptier for it. There are so many fabrics being woven over there. Woolens, worsteds, silks, hemps, skins. Mountains in the distance! The average denim wearer has been successfully indoctrinated from birth and cannot seriously fathom alternatives. Among the adventurous, denim remains the yardstick against which all fabrics are measured. As the default mode, denim is the first place of refuge in the wake of a real fashion disaster: in some sense an infantilizing force despite the insisted connection to manhood. We live in a different time, we need new stories.

Some popular thought experiments provide fuel for hope. The public recoils at the Jouch. Other creative uses of denim (like some early 2000s red carpet looks), projects which threaten the jean paradigm, remain culturally shunned. It seems like the denim age is far from over.”
— Will Pelletier

“Denim is guilty of many sins, but the fabric’s worst transgression takes the form of pants—often called ‘jeans’—which conceal erections much more than any other material. Beneath dress slacks or athleisure garments an erect penis is pleasingly noticeable, while thick and restrictive denim obscures the otherwise proud organ, pinching it against one’s person. Likewise, for women, rigid denim often refuses to adequately cling to feminine curves, thus denying the natural and sublime occurrence of Camel Toe. Are we living in the Dark Ages? Where is the silk? The satin? The NYLON? Reject Neo-Passéism and reject the ubiquitous chastity of denim. Instead, get it hard and get it wet—and always dress to accent your sex.”
— Aaron Lange

“I would argue that the sin in question is not the textile itself, but the majority’s de-queering of it. After all, need we blaspheme against the noble oak tree just because William Blake saw it as a symbol of pagan Error (in that the Celts were said to perform their rituals of human sacrifice in sacred oaken groves, precursors to the later Dragon Temples of Albion’s Patriarch Druid)? In the case of denim, the human Error here is twofold: firstly, those people who see denim in purely utilitarian terms (by which I mean, as an article of clothing that can be casually thrown on without much in the way of thought or aesthetics, or its deeper symbolical meaning/fetishistic attributes), and secondly, those people who, through heteronormative mass hypnosis and cultural conditioning (be it secular, Abrahamic code residue, or otherwise), seem determined to either ignore or actively suppress the homoerotic attributes of this misunderstood fabric. For I would boldly state that denim is both the most masculine and also amongst the queerest of the textile family, and a powerful expression of Uranic wardrobe fetishism (one needs only to consider the vast number of Tumblrs specifically devoted to male asses snuggly encased in denim fabric, and it must be noted, you never see Tom of Finland men wearing corduroy). Therefore, I say, hate not denim, but rather those prudish heretics of the cloth who have tried to kill the erotic anima mundi of the denim collective.”
— James Champagne

“The true problem with denim lies in its confusion of fashion and function. In function it is a sturdy, reliable material, protective and well-suited for manual labor. In fashion, it evokes associations of a romanticized working class America. Either one of these is fine, separated and without cross-contamination, but this is possible only in theory. In reality, the cross-contamination of denim’s fashion and function is inescapable. There is something inherently fraudulent in wearing denim outside of working class labor—it’s class tourism, brought upon by ad agencies paying large sums to beautiful, preening men so they can step out of the hair and makeup chairs to model their jeans and smoke their Marlboros for a fussy, pretty photo shoot. So the rich New Yorkers will buy it and the prices go up on the working man’s jeans, worn by the toothless, oil-stained man over his busted knees as he kneels in gravel under a car; he has never been as pretty, educated, or well-paid as the man who modeled them. The paradox becomes known, attacked, and so the tactics pivot and repeat in cyclical patterns. Pre-faded. Pre-ripped. Raw. These fussy matters of fashion, fruitlessly chasing an authenticity they will never know, taint the source. The working class that just needs something to wear to the job can’t rinse off the stench of the New York bullshit, haven’t been able to for decades. They get caught up in it, too, declaring brand loyalties and taking sides. They feed into each other. The farce has endured for so long that we’ve been numb to it for decades, the very picture of passé.”
— Jeffrey Lange

“Denim’s transmogrification into a brittle luxury is the true masquerade of the ruling class. The symbol of labor now a fragile, pre-distressed commodity more likely to be traded than found in a working wardrobe.

Denim allows the wealthy to feel as if they toil. It is the performance of substance photocopied until it becomes a formless smear.”
— Hadrian Flyte

“Denim. As I exited the mage tower in my full denim suit buttoned to the top, the last of the freedom fries disintegrating within the violent acid baths of my stomach, I assumed the running stance of great men and prepared for my body to go havoc on these new running shoes. Step on me, Daddy, they cried in unison, while the ululating swathes of manmeat unclenched from the fabric of time. I was running now. Running high speed. Normies on their flip phones beheld me. Hints of a rancid stench entered my nostrils. Was this chafing, or was this freedom? ‘Kill all normies’, my brain insisted to itself. ‘You wanna do it, do it now.’ Weird that nature would see fit to furnish me so. I sensed a psionic brainwave forming inside of me. Then I pivoted my torso 180 degrees and bowed to see the inside of my thighs where they transitioned into the crack of doom. It was there I noticed the apparent cause of my discomfort. Yes, there it was, the burn of freedom.”
— Martin Lohrer

“Denim is to silk, or even rayon, what a peeled-off label from a bottle of Schmidt in the shadow of a urinal at a Dave Matthews' tribute show is to an egg hand-peeled by Luigi Mangione and dipped in pure LSD. I'd sooner wrap my legs in fiberglass than have anything to do with the former.”
— Damian Murphy

"Judging blue jeans' inherent erotics against leather's, Terence Sellers (writing as Mistress Angel Stern in THE CORRECT SADIST) decrees: ‘Denim vies for a place on the throne near it, but it is too common, too cheap.’ Dominatrix dogma, perhaps, but the matter of discipline—or denim's evasion of it—goes precisely to today's dilemma. If bull skin comes with a bestial aegis, under the aegis of what or whom—forty triple-pleated, acid-washed, pre-faded, pre-slashed years since Sellers' appraisal—do Levi's et al. protect? Jerry Seinfeld's? Steve Jobs'? My Dad's? Your Mom's? I don't know... Ask a Neo-Passéist!"
— Dan Heyer

“The idea that denim has any role in higher or more nuanced fashion is a curious delusion of the 20th century. Even more so than sitting down to a bowl of asbestos flakes garnished with plastic and lead, or believing in Keynesian economics, there is something distinctly dated about its continued survival. When witnessing the young women of Tokyo, Beijing, Kinshasa, São Paulo or any other 21st century city (the stylistic retrogrades of New York and London being obviously beneath notice, much less concern), or the modern class of international travelers seeking ‘comfortable’ airport wear, we are always distressed to see them degrading themselves with denim. Vices are permitted in moderation, yet the overall effect is grating. There is nothing to prevent the material from returning at some point in the 22nd century after a period of cleansing penitence, but it should be retired for, at least, the next fifty years. It may come to play a different role in the struggles of the Future-Decadents and Future-Passéists, but for now, we will take the appropriate steps in declaring its utter and irredeemable Neo-Passéism.”
— Justin Isis

art by Aaron Lange