One pair of jeans in my closet stands out from the rest of my denim collection—my skinny jeans. They don’t fit and I honestly can’t remember the last time I wore them. Outdated and stiff from years of disuse, these jeans hang in the farthest reaches of my closet. I look at them every morning as I dress and then proceed to reach for my comfortable Levis.
I really should throw the skinny jeans away because they don’t fit at all, but I need them. While I can’t wear them, they remind me of a time when I was in amazing shape and serve as motivation for my future physical endeavors. As long as I own these jeans, a part of me knows that it is possible to get back in shape, to see the jeans fit again, to look like Kate Moss in a Calvin Klein ad.
If you look deep enough in every woman’s closet, even if she is a size zero, you’ll find a pair of too-skinny jeans.
“I’m still holding out for [my skinny jeans],” said my friend and fellow member of the female sex, Kat Chin, as we discussed the notion of skinny jeans over the telephone. “They are outdated but could still work.”
Guys succumb to this phenomenon as well. “Yeah I have a pair,” Adnan Karim, a sophomore at Georgetown, admitted to me while studying in Lauinger.
For some owners, instead of staying a distant pipe dream, these jeans provide enough motivation to whip them into shape.
“They fit now but last year they didn’t,” Karim said proudly.
From time to time I try on my skinny jeans to gauge my progress (or lack therefore of). I immediately go to the gym and swear that I’m never eating again after the usually humiliating experience.
Still, a week or so ago I mustered up the courage to try them on. I pulled the thick, dark denim up my legs and was surprised when they went over my hips. Feeling my self-esteem soaring, I realized the hard part was yet to come at I looked at myself in the mirror, inhaled deeply, thought thin and struggled to pull the zipper up. My skinny jeans actually fit, kind of.
I kept the jeans on as a matter of principle, though the fabric was tight and uncomfortable. The jeans are low riders and emphasize “booty, booty, booty rockin’ everywhere.” I fought this effect by putting on an oversized sweater and decided to go for a walk. My skinny jeans fit and I wanted the world to see.
An hour later the jeans had to come off. As I peeled away the tight denim and pulled on my worn, slightly oversized Levis, I exhaled, realizing that I hadn’t really breathed for over an hour. I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that while these Levis might be my “fat jeans,” they look better than my skinny ones.
The skinny jeans are an unattainable ideal, an effort to emulate the sunken, famished look perfected by the likes of Kate Bosworth and the indomitable Nicole Richie. In reality, the ideal isn’t that great: most of us would rather have a cookie than fit into size 25 Citizens.
There’s nothing attractive about wearing jeans that make you look and feel uncomfortable. A person happy and comfortable in her fat jeans can vouch for the truth behind the cartoon Garfield’s fat and happy ideology.
Regardless of all this my skinny jeans remain in my closet. It’s likely that I’ll never wear these jeans, but there is a chance that one day I’ll be able to wear them without losing circulation in my lower limbs. This chance is enough for me to keep the jeans. But until that day comes, I am more than happy and comfortable in my fat pair.
