As I dropped my daughter off at school today (her 16th birthday!!), I noticed a very tall girl with very skinny legs wearing very skinny jeans. It made me think: How does she manage to pull those on? I also wondered if she knows the history of her current fashion statement. My guess is, probably not.
Of course, the immediate precursor would be the skin-tight "shrink-to-fit" jeans of the 1980s (still ten years before my daughter or the skinny-jeans girl were born). In particular, I recall the Jordache brand, mostly because of Gilda Radner's brilliant "Jewess Jeans" ad spoof on Saturday Night Live. To get their designer jeans to fit even tighter, some fashionistas would squeeze into them and then stew in a bathtub full of hot water until their pants "shrank-to-fit." Urban legend even tells of one girl (most likely, a friend of a friend of someone who heard about it from their cousin, who swears its true), who nearly asphyxiated herself in the process and had to be cut out of her jeans in the hospital emergency room.
But I want to take you back two decades further. Before skinny jeans. Before designer jeans. Back to the Lost Land of Pegged Pants.
The year was 1964, I was in the third grade, and the Beatles were just beginning to hit America. But in our household, the Beach Boys ruled. It was my sister, Kathy, who got the first portable stereo in the family, for her 12th birthday. Remember the kind where the turntable would fold down, you would stack up a bunch of LPs and they would come crashing down one-at-a-time as they were cued up? Yeah, one of those. And she introduced us to pop music. playing her Beach Boys albums around the clock. That fall, I learned everything there was to know about "wahinis," "hanging ten," "GTO's" and how to have "fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes her T-Bird away." It was also the year I was introduced to the exciting world of fashion.
Up to that point, I simply wore whatever my mother purchased at JC Penney. Clothing magically appeared in my closet and I put it on. But my sister had also received a sewing machine for her birthday and had started the mysterious process of "pegging" her pants. She wanted to know if I wanted to have my pants done, too? Sure, I replied, eagerly. I would do just about anything to reduce my nerd-quotient at Strawberry Point Elementary, which was rapidly approaching the school record. (Or rather, I would do anything unless it actually involved me being less of a nerd.)
I brought her my cotton-polyester school slacks and she had me put them on inside-out. Next she pinned the seams on both sides of each leg tight to the skin. I was leery of all those pins, but she was careful not to stick me. Getting the pants off after this process was a tricky, but easier with two persons. Finally she sewed up the seams on her new Singer and, voila, instant coolness.
That is, unless somebody unfortunately witnessed you trying to either put them on or take them off.
Getting into pegged pants wasn't too difficult, just odd. It involved putting plastic Baggies over both feet, so your legs could slide into them like a pair of pasty-white sausages being stuffed into their casings. Once on, the pegged pants did give off a distinct Beach Boys vibe, though sitting down in them was nearly impossible. I have been searching without much luck for a picture of me wearing them. Perhaps that's a good thing; seeing a photo of her dad looking impossibly cool might permanently scar my daughter.
Getting out of pegged pants was a whole different story. The Baggie trick just did not work in reverse. Instead, you started by peeling them off down to your feet. That's where the fun began. It's surprising how little leverage you can get while trying to tug your pants cuff off one foot, with the other still entrapped. No angle is effective. If my sister was nearby, she would lend a hand, but I was often helpless. The struggle could go on for many minutes, hours, or even days as I was held hostage in these larger versions of the old practical joke: the Chinese finger trap.
If you needed to take them off at the doctor's office or at school, you were basically out of luck. More often than not, I would end up tearing the pegged seams at the cuff, which resulted with my formerly cool pegged pants having a bizarre little bell-bottom flare at the bottom.
Thankfully, my infatuation with pegged pants faded quickly, and I went back to wearing the Magic Closet Clothes. It would be another three years before I would venture out again into the turbulent waters of contemporary fashion. That would be in 1967, during the Summer of Love. But that is another story, for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment