Twenty minutes in the changing room is all that stands between you and your forever denims
Why is it so tricky to shop for jeans? You walk into a store where 2,458 almost-identical slivers of blue denim are stacked in forbiddingly neat piles in front of you. You approach this wall of denim and a sales assistant immediately barks CAN I HELP YOU? in a tone of voice you recognise as code for, “I spent all morning lining those up, madam, and if you so much as lay a finger on my masterpiece I will put a curse on your unborn children.”
So, of course, being British you say “Oh no, I’m fine, thank you so much” and peer at the shelves trying to deduce from the obtuse names of the jeans – “Baxter”, say, or “Houston” – which are going to magically make you look like Jane Birkin in St Tropez or Kate Moss at Glastonbury.
The labels on jeans are a bit like labels on wine bottles, in that they are dense with geeky vocabulary that means absolutely nothing to the overwhelming majority of people buying them. You just want to know which jeans will make your bum look nice/which bottle of red will not taste of vinegar or leave you feeling poisoned for two days. When I’m looking at a pair of jeans, the weight in ounces of the fabric per yard is about as helpful as the topographical details of the vineyard when I’m choosing a bottle wine.
