OPINION:
Move over, ripped jeans. Nordstrom has now come up with a new way to make it appear the wearer is having a hard day — the Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans, complete with “caked-on muddy coating.”
For the wanna-work in you — that just can’t quite bring on the work.
It’s all faux mud, of course. But faux doesn’t mean cheap.
It’ll cost $425 for a pair of these fake-mud jeans, dotted with dirt, smeared with grime — key word, fake, fake, fake. Want to look like a construction worker, without putting in the hard day’s work?
These are for you.
The retailer bills them as “heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans” that “embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.”
The dirty little secret (no pun intended)? You really are afraid to get down and dirty. Still, faux dirt and fake grit, casual Friday, they’re probably not.
Social media, of course, is mocking — beginning with a commenter below the Nordstrom webpage who could’t keep the scorn from her post.
“These jeans work so you don’t have to,” wrote SingleTrackGirl, on the Nordstrom site. “These jeans are built Ford tough for the hipster who is built Prius-weak. Look like you are a self-reliant, capable man rather than the sniveling lady boy you truly are. Two thumbs up for down-home authenticity.”
Ouch.
And then these was this, from the TV guy best known for getting his hands dirty, Mike Rowe, of Discovery Channel “Dirty Jobs” fame: “[These jeans] aren’t pants,” he wrote on Facebook.
No, they aren’t. They’re more symbolic than simple pants could ever be.
“[They’re] further proof that our country’s war on work continues to rage in all corners of polite society,” he went on. “A pair of jeans that look like they have been worn by someone with a dirty job … made for people who don’t.”
Right. A new symbol to show how lazy America’s become.
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