Although there is no formal dress code at the school where I teach, staff members may wear jeans on Fridays if they make a $1 charitable contribution.
With no explicit dress code, I’m fairly certain I could wear jeans every day if I wanted to, but I’m not ready to rock that boat. I’m not so attached to jeans (at least not yet) that I feel the need to wear them every day.
That may change someday, but so far, I’m happy to give my dollar and wear jeans on the assigned day.
But if we were to look at this issue objectively, reasonably, and absent the stupidity of conformity or tradition, you have to ask:
What exactly distinguishes my jeans from the khaki pants, corduroys, or dress slacks that I wear every other day?
Is it the denim?
Is the material designed by Levi Strauss many years ago so clearly unprofessional in its blueness, elasticity, and durability that it can’t be worn in a professional setting without the offer of a charitable payment? Is denim so uncouth or unkempt that employees wearing jeans cannot appear professional to potential customers and clients?
Or is it the fact that those long-haired rock-and-roll types are wearing jeans as they shake their hips onstage and play their electric guitars, and as a result, the wearing of jeans automatically confers the sense of moral degradation and societal breakdown?
That may have been true in the 1960s, when old people were stupid, but I don’t think this perception applies today.
Is it perhaps the rivets? The stone-washed texture? The way that denim encapsulates a person’s ass or thighs?
Or is it simply because James Dean popularized jeans in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, and, as a result, wearing jeans became a symbol of youth rebellion during the 1950s, a reputation that has persisted ever since?
I think it’s probably that because, objectively, there is little difference between the jeans and the khaki pants or corduroy slacks I wear. In fact, there’s nothing objectively different between denim and any other fabric.
I suspect that the only thing keeping people from wearing jeans every day at the workplace is the old people in charge who are stuck on tradition and conformity and unwilling to examine their world through an objective, logical, and clear lens.
These are the rules followers—the lemmings—the cowards who would rather perpetuate some misinformed, illogical, nonsensical stereotype about a fabric and the people who choose to wear it than stand for what is right, logical, and sensible.
I suddenly find myself wanting to wear jeans every day of my life.
UPDATE:
This post was written in December of 2016. By the fall of 2017, I was wearing jeans to work whenever I wanted.
I don’t know what I was thinking in 2016.
