Jeans For Feens Lobby Group

22nd Apr 2015

PROC is proud to announce the establishment of the Jeans For Feens Lobby Group which will lobby fashion stores in Cork to start stocking ordinary simple plain pants again.

Most Cork feens aren’t mad about shopping despite what tatty free sheets might pretend on page eighty-one that even the publishers know that nobody reads except the people who buy the ads.
 

You find a nice pair of jeans only to realise that you need to get a leg transplant from a swan to fit into them.

The majority of lads who need new clothes want to be in and out of town in less than the lifetime of one parking disc so they can get back to practicing 45s, fixing stuff and drinking beer.

Opera Lane is handy as there is a cluster of big brand clothing outlets which means you don’t have to traipse from one end of Pana to the other and back again to find the perfect pant. Or so it seems until you actually start browsing the shops for what you thought would be a bog standard easy-to-find staple of any fashion outlet worth its salt.

The phenomenal rise of the metrosexual and the hipster, in Dublin in particular, has seen the death of decent pragmatic clothing. Walk into one of the Opera Lane outlets today and there is no shortage of jeans - there are racks and shelves and fancy hangy-up thingys all with a mesmerising selection of styles except one: normal.

When you enter one of these unisex fashion stores the lads section is usually packed away in a corner upstairs or in the basement where an under fed lad with a scraggy beard and an ironic t-shirt with a character from The Muppets DJing on some turntables on it, shifts about in the shadows folding things that don’t need to be folded to the sound of a London band so cool and contemporary that the musicians don’t even know they are in it yet.

Fellas looking for a half-decent smart pair of pants are now bombarded with a confusing clatter of impractically shaped garments.Jean colours haven’t changed over the years. They are still as black, grey and blue as when St. Finbarre founded the Arcadia and JJ started knocking out pints of Murphy's on Leitrim Street. However, trying to get them on very much has.

Comrades, it won’t stop at drainpipe legs, wild dog damage and awkward button flies. No. It’s going to get worse. It won’t be long before you have to download an app and punch in a code just to get your fly open for a pee or require a visit to your local welder just to get your jeans on. It’s time we stood up and said we’ve had enough.
When folded tightly on a shelf you can often be fooled into fancying a pants by the area around its arse pocket. After spending a few minutes of your parking disc trying combing through a stack of them to find your size you spin to the changing room and its disorientating funky mirrors and blinding lights.

It is only now, as you stand in your jocks, that you realise that these perfectly fine pair of pants have been deliberately ripped and torn by the jaws of a psychotic wild dog somewhere in deepest darkest child-labour-ist China.

The thrashed look might be fine for the stone washed George Michael retro-1987 stuff but why would someone mangle these otherwise perfectly good jeans into something that you wouldn’t even put on if someone offered them to you after you accidentally locked yourself out of your house balls naked on a cold Monday morning during rush hour?

It’s admittedly handy to have a raggy pair of jeans for manly things like changing the oil in your car but the random holes made by the wild dogs often extend, unhelpfully, to the knees – the one place you need some padding  because, as any man knows, manly tasks always involve getting down on at least one knee (it makes you look like you know what you’re doing even when you don’t).

After tossing them back on the heap to give The Folder something to do, you again get fooled by another seemingly attractive pair whose “slim fit” tag is written in a font that is so fashionably obscure that it can only be read by hipsters who can name eight types of organic coffee bean from Guatemala.

After five minutes of trying to wedge the slim fits up your leg and finally deciding that only people with body mass indexes in single figures can get into such a ridiculous excuse for a pants you will realise that getting them off is even harder than getting them on.

It is not uncommon to find yourself on your back in a changing room in town twisting around the ground trying to find a way to peel skinny fit jeans off your body – to the point where calling the fire brigade over from Angelsea Street to release you from your pants prison actually starts to seem like a reasonable option.

No wonder so many feens wear trackie bottoms around town.

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