I know people whose employers allow them to wear jeans on specific days if they make a donation to a charitable organization.
These employers, I think, are quite dumb.
If we look at the issue of jeans objectively, reasonably, and absent the stupidity of conformity or tradition, you’d have to ask:
What exactly makes my jeans any different from the khakis, corduroys, chinos, trousers, or the dress slacks that also adorn people’s lower torsos?
Is it the denim? Is the material created by Levi Strauss many years ago so clearly unprofessional in its blueness or elasticity or durability that it can’t be worn in a professional setting without the offer of a charitable contribution? Is denim so uncouth or unkempt that employees wearing jeans are incapable of appearing professional to potential customers and clients?
It’s just a fabric. Right? Objectively, is there anything that about the properties of this fabric that make it any less appropriate for work than any other?
Or is it the fact that those long haired, rock-and-roll types are wearing jeans as they shake their asses onstage and play their electric guitars, and as a result, the wearing of jeans automatically confers the sense moral degradation and societal breakdown?
That may have been true in the 1960’s when old people thought these stupid things, 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 youthful rebellion during the 1950s, and that reputation has remained in place ever since?
I think it’s probably that, because objectively, there is little difference between the jeans and the dress pants and khaki pants and corduroy slacks that I wear.
In fact, there’s nothing objectively different between denim and any other fabric. It’s all in your damn mind.
I suspect that the only thing keeping people from wearing jeans every day at the workplace are 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.
Also the tragic conformists. 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 rather than standing for what is right and logical and sensible.
Happily, I’m not confined by a dress code. I wear jeans whenever I want. Not everyday. Not even most days. But whenever I feel the need. While I should not look slovenly as a teacher, I also recognize that the only difference between denim and every other type of fabric is in the eye of the fussy, foolish beholder.
Besides, if you can give a dollar to the ASPCA on Fridays to wear jeans, isn’t that acknowledgement enough that jeans aren’t so bad after all?
If I give $2, can I wear gym shorts?
If I give $3, can I wear flip-flops?
If I give $20, can I wear a tube top?
Probably not. But jeans? Yes, a small donation somehow makes them palatable because they were always palatable.
If I had a boss who was asinine enough to order me to stop wearing jeans, I think I might seriously consider wearing skirts on occasion. I’d love to see one of these tradition-embracing, norm-entrapped supervisors contend with the fact that instead of seeing me in jeans, they would instead be subjected to my legs in a floral skirt that just touches my knees.
Maybe a pair of pantyhose, too. You know, to complete the look.
