Newish Jeans
What makes a pair of men’s pants great? Writer Connor Garel considers a pair of OUR LEGACY jeans that he can’t stop wearing.
A dear friend recently shared with me a memory from his adolescence. At 14, just as he’d started thinking about sex (which is not to say having it), he sprouted a large cyst on his scrotum, a rash that kissed his inner thighs, and, like all reasonable people with access to WebMD, determined that he had testicular cancer. “You been getting your dick sucked?” asked his stepfather, pride bloating his voice. Sufficiently panicked, my friend scheduled an appointment with his GP, who advised that he did not, in fact, have testicular cancer. What he did have was a case of fashion victimhood. It was the early 2010s, the alleged last gasp of that rabid mania over jeans so tight they sacrificed blood flow, and maybe he’d taken the look a little too far, had strangled the crown jewels just as he reached the precipice of . . . well . . . . It wasn’t cancer. It was denim. His doctor prescribed ointment, and looser jeans.
Can doctors be accidental fashion critics? Are skinny jeans a medical threat? These are the most pressing questions of our blackened, airless moment. I was in high school when the whole “indie sleaze” thing was happening, watching my coolest peers make video edits jerkin’ (℅ the New Boyz) in multicoloured jeans that looked sprayed on, like you’d have to scrape them off the legs to remove the evidence. They accessorized with piano belts and foxtails and checkered boxers that pooled up over their waistbands, and—honestly? It was peak sex appeal.But I remember fighting to peel off my own dark gray pair some days after school, hopping with one leg half-out and the other still stuck, sighing upon removal, and thinking, The alternatives, the possibility of relief, never occurred to me. How could I have known that from 2005 onward, over in Sweden, OUR LEGACY was forming a style cult whose uniform comprised these off-kilter, wide-legged jeans that, because they were anti-trend, were also light-years ahead? The signal is weaker in the suburbs of Toronto. It took longer for news to reach us.
I think tightness is a pursuit for the very, very young. Like Renata Adler says of sanity, a relaxed fit seems the most profound moral option of our times. I am rarely keen to show off my body, except maybe at the beach or in the club or on an island, and prefer to drape it with mohair knits and oversized pants as if to obfuscate any evidence that I have one. These days, hip-hop, skaters, and ravers are hardly in the margins of the culture anymore, insofar as we a culture in our flattened, micro-trend landscape, and it’s a blessing that their voluminous self-stylings might override the hype-chain. (A sentimental semiotic analysis may say it implies room to change and grow!) A DSM buyer called the OUR LEGACY sensibility “punk boardroom,” which to me is paradoxical, although I have worn these in a boardroom. “Broken preppy” still works. “Techno cowboy” works best.The silhouette of a man’s jeans, much like the idea of gender itself, has always been an unstable category. The pants never know what they want to be, and I can relate. A few years ago, someone (metaphorically) sniped Hedi Slimane through an open window in Paris, and everyone’s pants miraculously inflated two sizes. But every couple of months, a fashion writer heralds the grand return of skinny jeans, and while on an intellectual level I know they’re just trying to make a buck off an affiliate link, it still makes me want to projectile vomit. It’s not just that most trends bore me (they do), or that I’m suspicious of consensus (I am). It’s that I think skinny jeans are . I read somewhere that a rise of fascism tends to correspond with clothes getting tighter—something about captivity and discipline and power and authority. The limitations of bodily freedom, et cetera. Big jeans feel like an argument against confinement. Maybe every era gets the silhouette it deserves.
Or maybe that’s all bullshit! What do I know? I’m not a historian or a trend forecaster, and I guess the punks loved the skinny thing, and I love the punks. When I was living in East London in 2022, someone at a jazz bar who mistook me for an American (despite my Canadian tuxedo and affable disposition) told me about how all the US schools got together and banned jeans in the 1950s, all because the straight-legged ones Marlon Brando wore in were, apparently, likely to inspire rebellion among teenagers. Americans love to ban things: jeans, scarves, books. Anything that could arm or style dissent. Can you imagine? A revolution, all because a movie character asks, “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” and the other, slick and handsome, replies, “Whaddaya got?” I wish. To be fair, Brando makes denim look dangerous. Where Tony Leung makes smoking look romantic, Brando makes it look sinister. Sometimes I reach for a Marlboro in the back pocket of these jeans and then remember that I do not smoke. They have that sort of character.
It’s important to have a perfect pair of jeans, in the perfect shade of ash blue, with a circumference so wide you could accommodate another set of legs (community!). They should be the rugged kind that look somehow unconsidered, the kind that form small tents over your shoes. I will never forgive my parents for not making me taller (I am 5’9”), but the rise and silhouette of these ones somehow cure my height dysphoria, so in that way they’re gender-affirming. I wore them to a third date with a writer in Central Park. He is much more rebellious than I am, and smokes. As a rule, I don’t really date writers. I’m generally of the belief that all men are either sensuous or intellectual, and I find writers are always intellectual and struggle not to be neurotic. I think I wore them because I wanted to project a sense of ease, like I’m not also neurotic, like I didn’t change twice beforehand. I can’t say whether it worked. He didn’t notice them. Instead, he commented on the “glassy” quality of my skin, which was a nice compromise. At least I’d earned that. These jeans were sent to me. We sat in the dirt and it was fine, because the jeans already look dirty.I got them a size big. I wanted the hems to scuff. Like haircuts, I think denim looks best when it’s worn in. These ones arrived faded, whiskered, and predistressed, with markings on the front that resemble grass stains. I favor things that hold the memory of where they’ve been, even if the memory is a lie or belongs to someone else. Leather that smiles and creases. Book pages ringed with coffee stains, or folded/underlined by friends/exes I lent them to. I like when people have tattoos they regret. I’m wearing the jeans at LaGuardia Airport, writing this as I wait to go home to Toronto, and I’ve just read this one sentence from Grégoire Bouiller’s : “And not every love story leaves a scar to prove it existed.” Sometimes, you want the scar, the evidence that something happened.
