Life Through Indigo-Colored Glasses
- Lucien Etori

It starts innocently enough.
It always does.

Hip-Hop -- of which I used to be quite the aficionado and connoisseur for a good chunk of the 80s/90s -- has always had a ravenous appetite for the latest and most gratuitously expensive. Indeed it still consumes/discards brands at breathtaking velocity and played a prominent directional role initially. Seeing all my favorite groups swaddled in Girbaud or Guess in videos created quite the longing.

I felt catastrophically inadequate in my Bugle Boy (as you could certainly imagine one would) and acid-washed Get Used jeans (an unavoidable denim brand in Washington D.C. at the time, not to worry I’ve burned all the photographic evidence) and was thus left with almost no choice BUT to embark on a long winding journey through the indigo-colored forest of increasingly more premium denim. My self-esteem depended on it.

Denim has been called a myriad things but one of the terms that most resonates with me is “The Great Equalizer” - I might have made that up just now actually or maybe it’s a vestigial remain of some article I read long ago – Everybody owns jeans (except for Milanese men over the age of 35, walking around that city a few years back I was shocked by how few in that demographic wear them). Bill Gates undoubtedly owns many pairs – and given his self-admitted lack of style they’re likely stonewashed and somewhat tapered -- so does the delivery guy from the restaurant down the street, and while the gap in their status/liquidity could not possibly be wider, I would bet the latter’s jeans aren’t vastly different in fabrication and quality than those of the richest man in the known universe.

One could argue that that’s a good thing. A good thing that jeans are the one item of clothing that anybody – men, women and children of all ages - can have and look reasonably decent in. A good thing that a pair of blue jeans is arguably, the anchor of the archetypal American wardrobe. Surely this was part of the egalitarian dream of the founding fathers: life, liberty and the pursuit of the perfect pair of jeans? (or dungarees as it were). Yes that’s a good thing for most. But mine is a different pursuit. One specifically geared towards finding the most excruciatingly exclusive pair of jeans available, cost and torpedoes be damned!

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