Why Jeans Are Evil

Across America, men, women, and children are wearing the same pants: jeans. Not only a sartorial crime, the trend is an “obnoxious misuse of freedom,” rails George Will of the Washington Post. Levi Strauss set out to make tough pants for 49ers who spent all day in the mud, and “it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags into golf carts to go around dressed for driving steers.”

Today’s denim is a “carefully calculated costume,” designed to look casual, indifferent, exactly as slovenly as the next guy. Actually dressing well “would be to commit the sin of lookism—of believing that appearance matters,” Will explains. “That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.” (More George Will stories.)