If ever Jamie and I get to the point, with this blog, where we feel comfortable putting up one of those "donate to us" buttons that many of the better-trafficked blogs have, I think my personal button will say something along the lines of "Help Me Buy a $200 Pair of Diesel Jeans."
I don’t actually know that I would look good in Diesel jeans, since I’ve never owned a pair and never quite felt wealthy-looking enough to go into the store and try them on (as if they have a wealth-sensor built into the doorframe of the dressing room), but it’s a fantasy. Because I love me some blue jeans, and Diesel, though it may not be the most chic label at the moment, is for me the platonic form of a certain kind of beautifully casual, vaguely bohemian jeans.
When I say that I love blue jeans, I should probably clarify. I don’t love them as an art object, though I admire them as such. What I love is how good they make me feel, when they’re the right pair — both very comfortable and good-looking on me — when I’m wearing them. I would guess that they are, in the parlance of a certain school of psychotherapy, a healthy self-object, or at the very least an unhealthy self-object — an item through which I understand myself and in which I invest some notion of who I am and who I’d like to be.
What’s interesting to me, from a masculinist perspective, are two things. One is that an attachment to jeans is the kind of thing that women, in general, are much more familiar with, or at least much more conscious of, than your average American straight white man, who simply doesn’t think about his clothes like this (which is to say, obviously, that this is one more way in which I happen to be deliciously enlightened). Another is that however unconscious men are of the relationship between their clothes and their conceptions and presentations of self, the relationship is there.
Men, to greater and lesser degrees, look like what they want to look like. They tell the world that this man wants to be a seen as of a certain class, a certain culture, a certain sexuality. That’s why he wears leather shoes rather than sneakers, black jeans rather than red ones, a Fedora rather than a baseball cap rather than a do-rag. He wears a T-shirt that says Miller Lite on it but wouldn’t wear one that said Stella Artois. He cuts his hair high and tight, or long and flowing, or moussed and spritzed and spiky.
In my idealized vision of myself I’m wearing a really nice pair of (Diesel, or Diesel-ish) jeans and a perfectly faded, perfectly fitting T-shirt (something from American Apparel, say). I look, basically, like David Duchovny always looks in the various non-X-Files movies that he makes, like the very model of the modern sensitive, self-aware, self-possessed, affluent, intelligent and kind-hearted man with a wry sense of humor and a healthy sense of the absurd.
I looks at Jamie, say, and see a somewhat similar self-presentation, but with much more of the flavor of the visual art scene that’s been a big part of his life. It’s there in the baggy slacks he often wears, and the unruly hair, both of which also draw attention to a certain bearish physicality about him.
Tom Vannah, the editor of this august newspaper, has got a cross-country runner/mountain man/I play guitar for a Lynyrd Skynrd tribute band thing going, with his sporty shades and his Patagonia shirts and his beard and ponytail (I haven’t seen Tom for a while, so I don’t know the status of his various hair-related-program-activities).
Point is, we men are making statements, with our clothes, about who we are and how we want to be understood, and the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it seems that we talk about it so little, particularly the men (like Jamie, and Tom, and I) who obviously care about it more than just the minimum.
