May 23, 2012 |
Lately we’ve been slightly preoccupied. With the idea of jeans and the 1990s. You know, 1990s jeans. Very blue, artfully distressed, with that cream band running across the right-hand front pocket. With the word Diesel embroidered on it. They used to be the only jeans to be seen in and then they just sort of disappeared. Why everyone fell on the designer-jean bandwagon we’ll never understand. Who wants couture denim? Couture is all about the finest satins and silks from the bazaars of Arabia. Denim is playful, not serious. We’ll even quote Delores del Ruby on that. “Playfulness ceases to have a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously.” It’s the same with jeans. But now, in what could only be called serendipitous circumstances, we have been greeted by the wonderful news that Diesel have just reinvented the jean. Six new styles, redesigned to flatter the lady’s body, fit her attitude. They call them the Fit your Attitude jeans. Which brings us back to Delores, the sidekick to our heroine Sissy Hankshaw, her of the giant thumb in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. They had attitude. They wore blue jeans. Blue as the sky in the film. Blue that matches eyes. What we like to call Technicolour blue. Well, you can hardly hitchhike cross-country, become a model for transvestite hygiene products and, in the process of all this, meet the man you will marry, let alone call yourself a cowgirl without the proper attire. Didn’t Diesel even do an ad campaign once that reinforces our point? Featuring, if not a cowgirl exactly, a girl dressed in jeans on some vast, sandy landscape under a blue sky. The kind of girl you could imagine jumping onto a stray horse and riding bareback into the sunset. And if they didn’t, maybe they should. It would communicate at once both new, flattering jean and attitude, while also triggering some subconscious memory of a time past that we’d like to relive. They’d be flying off the shelves.
by Natalie Dembinska
