The days are shrinking to fit
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 175
CASUALWEAR DEP'T.
It's Denim Time Again
DUNGAREES SEASON IS here. The dungarees are down from the shelf. I'm wearing my dungarees and the word "dungarees" is lodged in my head even though I call them jeans. "Dungarees" is a word like "davenport" that I imagine my grandmother carried forward from a different time in a different place and put up in the attic of my idiolect. I can all but certainly hear my grandmother saying "davenport," with just a breath of knowing theatricality behind it, fully aware that her living posterity slouched on the couch. I would not absolutely swear she said "dungarees," if my life or fortune depended on the accuracy of the oath, but the word is there and I can't see who else would have put it there.
And here they are, the dungarees—the jeans, not to wear out the old-time bit, certainly not the "waist overalls." Every spring there comes a day when putting on stiff, heavy denim seems unthinkable, the thought of being even a little bit too warm unbearable, and the jeans rotate upward in the closet and the shorts come down within reach. Months later, after a few nights of vivid dreams in the crisp, invigorating air through the open windows, the opposite day arrives. To every thing, a season, etc.
The word "dungarees" had a surprisingly short heyday when I looked it up on Google Books. It took off in the Second World War, presumably with the help of the Navy, and peaked in the corpus in 1953, falling off toward 1960 as "jeans" flew away and left it behind. Back in the dungarees era, in November 1944, letter to Life magazine signed "FOUR WELLESLEY GIRLS," declared "We do not sympathize with stringy hair and baggy shirts, but we will fight to the death for our right to wear dungarees on the proper occasions." This was written in response to an earlier issue of Life having published a full-page PICTURE OF THE WEEK (a "waste of your valuable space," according to the FOUR WELLESLEY GIRLS) of two young women, photographed from behind, wearing baggy jeans and baggy shirts as they walked down the street. The facing page explained:
Last week the annual shriek of protest was raised against clothes of the girls of staid Wellesley College. This fall's style (opposite page) consummates a fad started a few years ago—dungarees, shirttails, stringy hair. Cried the Wellesley Townsman: “Girls who feel . .. must look like freaks should do their freaking within ...the campus. ...” To fathers who have hardly finished paying for fall wardrobes, these style pictures usually come as a blow.
The women in the photo seemed to be minding their own business, dressed with what would be classified in another three or four decades as indifference to the male gaze. Beyond the Life coverage, the Wellesley dungarees controversy went around the country via the Associated Press "It is my unsolicited advice to the little ones at Wellesley," Arthur "Bugs" Baer wrote, picking up the news in his nationally syndicated humor column, "to discard the burlap and go back to the elusive and tantalizing shimmers." The Jackson Sun of Jackson, Tennessee, published Baer's thoughts alongside Westbrook Pegler's "Pegler Speaks His Mind" column ("After all, this is our country, not the property of every unfortunate or merely disagreeable European who wants to come here").
Time and use soften denim. All my life, jeans have been uncontroversially All-American and also universal. By some fabulous social accord everyone has agreed to perceive that a broad assortment of shades of blue all constitute a neutral color, the most neutral, coordinating with anything.
When I was a teenager, acid-wash had been newly deployed at scale, and all of us were wearing jeans whose fabric had been violently pre-aged. We wanted to get violently older, ourselves, and it was encouraging to see the already pale and mottled denim fade and fray more with each wearing and washing, the accelerated accumulation of experience. We could leave our mark on them, all the way till our knees poked through.
To buy jeans that were actually ripped in advance, though, was shameful and absurd. Unearned. On this point I was an ideologue, and have remained one to this day. I do not have the standing, in taste or knowledge, to issue judgments on other people's fashion choices in general, but if you wear pre-ripped jeans you're a poseur.
As an adult, I moved into outright puritanism. What jeans should be, for me, is a pair of Levi's shrink-to-fit 501s that have been through the wash about twice, in cold water, and hung up to dry: stiff, a little baggy, and a dark, blackish blue. Wearing a pair of these jeans, I am almost entirely at ease, my legs encased in a timeless Platonic ideal of clothing.
Except after I wear them a couple times, that clean stiffness is gone, and I need to wash them again. That perfectly dark, blackish-blue denim comes out every so slightly less black and more blue. Steadily, imperceptibly, they become a different pair of jeans.
What this means, in practice, is that the longer I have the jeans, the less I wear them. In the far reaches of the closet are a few truly ancient pairs, pale blue, with blown-out knees or holes in the back pocket to mark the corners of a long-discarded wallet. The jeans still in circulation, though, are asymptotically converging on a single color, where sort of dark tips over into sort of light. One pair of 501s is still essentially dark and essentially crisp, waiting to work its way in among the rest.
Will I keep on adding to the pile for the rest of my life? Over the past year I bought one pair each of two other kinds of jeans, to see if they fade differently, or more slowly. Some autumn, presumably, I'll be so old myself I'll look ridiculous in any of them. I suppose that should happen sooner with the shorts, though.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, October 7, 2024
★★★★ Day didn't break so much as the long-lasting blackness out the windows very slowly turned gray, only to then turn into a darker gray. But the promise in the forecast that no rain would come was borne out; by late morning, sun had appeared. Shining white cumulus piled up in shapes beyond the rooftops. The air was just short of crisp. Down the avenue, over the crest of the gentle rise, the honey locusts were forming a wall of gold. The one growing near at hand, though, was as green as ever.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
CLICK ON THIS box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of the final sandwich selected from 'Please, M'm, The Butcher!': A Complete Guide To Catering For The Housewife Of Moderate Means, With Menus Of All Meals For A Year, Numerous Recipes, And Fifty-Two Additional Menus Of Dinners Without Meat, by Beatrice Guarracino, published in 1903, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Egg and Gherkin Sandwiches
2 Eggs.
Salt.
4 Gherkins.
Pepper.
Cayenne.
Thin Bread and Butter.
Boil the Eggs hard, pass the yolks through a sieve, season with Pepper, Salt and Cayenne. Mince the whites of the Eggs and the Gherkins, and mix all together. Have some thin Bread and Butter, spread with the mixture and make into sandwiches.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
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