Hooray for...Jean Shorts

We all wear uniforms. Your mother, your brother, your hot date, your teacher—all of us. Not baseball uniforms or waitressing uniforms--the ones I'm talking about are the uniforms we wear everyday. Mine consists of the following: New Balance 574s, plaid shorts or jeans, and a t-shirt. Sometimes the t-shirt has color and a logo and very rarely it is substituted for a button-up, but more often than not it’s just a plain white “t”.
Last night at Linda’s on Capitol Hill I had the fortune of getting to take in the new component of the hipster uniform: cut-off jean shorts. Half the guys in the outdoor seating area were wearing pants that they had mangled with scissors or some other kind of sharp edge (mutilated Pabst can?) and here is the reason it was so flabbergasting:
They were only doing this semi-ironically.
Now let’s go back three years to when I attended UW and lived on 20th Avenue NE in a seedy but morally fulfilling student house. One day our house hosted a barbecue, and my friend and I decided it would be hilarious if we wore extremely short cut-off jeans. Emboldened by gross amounts of Olympia brand beer and three-inch inseams, we strutted around the yard, giggling stupidly as we watched girls pretend to recoil in disgust. Except for my t-shirt, which depicted a large-mouth bass leaping out of the water that I had cut off near the belly to display more of my midriff than anyone should ever have to see, the whole thing was fairly innocuous.
But nowadays things have gotten out of hand.
Two weeks ago I went to Vancouver to visit my girlfriend and was brought by her sister and sister’s her American Apparel “deep V” wearing squeeze to a trendy vegetarian restaurant on 4th Avenue. Outside the restaurant sat a gaggle of twenty-somethings, obstructing the sidewalk as they sat cross -legged playing cards, waiting to get in and fill their maws with PETA approved foodstuffs. Every single one of them was wearing cut-off jean shorts. Some of them, the more “expressive” ones, had on thick flannel shirts accented by suspenders. With their scraggly beards, they looked like skinny, Amish versions of Paul Bunyan.
I asked one of them if there was a liquor store nearby and he said “yes,” and that “everyone should all, like, get some wine and go drink it in his van.” After shuddering discreetly I politely declined, stating that I would rather slit my wrists on and bleed to death on the sidewalk , and our group moseyed on its way.
I had kind of forgotten about this incident until last night, when I was figuratively slapped across the face by frayed denim and “Oh my God, he’s crazy for wearing cut-off jean shorts, I kind of like it” boys exuding self-satisfaction and girls waiting to give it to them. I sat down next to my friend and her friend and after remarking, “What the fuck is going on here/ I feel out of place” we launched into a 10-15 minute debate on whether or not it was OK that I had just judged the shit out of these hipsters based solely on their apparel. The conversation then turned to judgments in general, asking whether or not it is human nature and if one can compare the snap judgment one makes when meeting someone for the first time to one made driving through an intersection trying to avoid a traffic accident. As usual, I pushed drama. I pushed traffic accident.
“The bottom line,” what I should’ve stated but didn’t, “is that these neo-hippy hipsters are no better than the ICP kids that hang out at the 45th Street bus stop on the AVE and talk about how much they hate their parents. In fact, they’re worse. They were horrible sunglasses that make their faces look like bugs and play kickball in your local park but get pissed off at anyone that actually tries. They are striving towards a level of apathetic mediocrity that makes me cringe.”
The debate ended in a stalemate when a jean short-wearing kid with a basketball jersey accidentally bumped a glass off the table that shattered on the ground below. I got up to go to the bathroom and, slipping past a guy in suspenders, made my way to the haven of the lavatory to reflect on the discussion that had just taken place.
“I think it’s good that they are expressing themselves,” my friend’s friend had said, “I don’t think I would have the balls to do that.”
“That’s the problem,” I shot back. “It doesn’t take balls. Everyone here is doing it. It takes balls not to do it. I’m the only one here wearing white plaid shorts and I feel like at any second I might get hit over the head with a fixed-gear sprocket for looking like a frat boy.”
And that is the problem, with hipsterdom, or any sub-cultural movement: what starts of as “individualistic expression” soon becomes the norm, and then you’re just another uniform-wearing patsy like me in my white plaid shorts. Or you in your cut-off jean-shorts and suspenders. We’re all patsies. We’re all shmucks. The only difference is, you look like a fucking idiot.