The sign on the door of John English’s store reads “No
shoes, No shirt, No service. And pull up your pants!” Waiting in
the checkout line, I ask the proprietor if he is still having
trouble with shirtless and shoeless customers with sagging
trousers.
“It’s worse,” John moans, shaking his head despondently.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
John has run this little corner grocery for 35 years. He’s
seen nonconformist fashion trends come and go: ultra-miniskirts,
hoodies, backward baseball caps. Who can forget that brief period a
few years ago when girls wore those incredibly low-cut jeans with
the highly visible thongs?
“I didn’t think it could get worse than the saggy pants,”
John says. “Boy was I naive.”
I remember the sagging pants. They were all the rage in
the 1990s. At first the trousers sagged only somewhat, barely
enough to identify the color and make of the boxers. As the years
advanced, however, trousers continued their downward
progression.
In those days, there was much debate about the
significance of “jailin’,” as the trend was called. Berkeley grad
school students even wrote dissertations on the phenomenon. One
popular theory had the fad originating with prisoners’ ill-fitting
clothing. Ex-cons brought this fashion statement to the ghetto
where it was popularized. Wearing droopy drawers became a symbol of
solidarity with convicts past and present.
Today we can look back on the era of the sagging trousers
as a relatively enlightened period. Some of the younger (male
mostly) customers coming into John English’s store now wear long
tight-fitting gym shorts that they position well below their
buttocks. What’s more, they have switched from boxers to tighty
whities. I have no idea why, but doubtless some Berkeley grad
student is researching the subject as we speak. (What must it be
like to have one’s every asinine deed awarded cultural
significance?)
As for John’s signage, the stern warning seems to be
having the desired effect, though the impact is temporary; once
outside the store, down go the drawers.
“They can’t even walk,” John says. “They got their pants
down around their knees and they can barely walk. I don’t get it.
Why wear pants at all? Why not just walk around in your
skivvies?”
Beats me. I thought the fad would have been long gone by
now. Dumb fashions usually have a lifespan of five years, tops. Not
even leisure suits had this kind of longevity.
I WILL SAY ONE THING: the great science fiction writers
had it all wrong. According to the sci-fi classics, by now we
should all be wearing metallic form-fitting uniforms like the
Robinson family from Lost in Space. I suppose if H.G.
Wells and Isaac Asimov had really been prescient, they would have
portrayed their futuristic characters stumbling around with their
pants around their ankles.
The trouble with sci-fi authors is most assumed Homo
sapiens would continue to evolve intellectually when all the
evidence points in the opposite direction. As far as I can tell,
the only writer who has gotten it right is Mike Judge. Judge’s film
Idiocracy depicts a future in which no one has an IQ above
70, although even these denizens of future Earth at least appear to
wear belts.
I fear that John may be leaving himself open to charges
of… whatever the ACLU calls discrimination based on the public
display of one’s soiled BVDs. It’s happened before. Banning
customers from one’s business because of the way they’re dressed —
or undressed — can get you into hot water, especially if the
banned person happens to hold membership in a protected class. I
just don’t want to see John’s store picketed by dozens of jockey
supporters who think that showing one’s dirty underpants is a
constitutional right, when it is clear from his writings that James
Madison was a supporter of decency: “If men were angels, no
pants would be necessary.”
I suppose it’s inevitable, too, that droopy-drawered
youths everywhere will demand victim status since wearing one’s
pants around one’s knees is a legitimate expression of
urban street culture — expressing contempt for societal norms and
the belt and suspender industries, I suppose. Anyone who decries
the continuing descent of man’s pants, and the ongoing
civilizational decline they symbolize, is obviously a
bigot.
I know, it sounds absurd. But is it any more absurd than
tripping around a grocery store with your pants around your
ankles?
