Faded jeans sign of the times

The sound a grasshopper made outside the sunroom window on a late summer’s day reminded me of attaching cards to the spokes on our bicycles with clothespins so to pretend we were riding motorcycles.

Click, click, click the cards would go as we pedaled faster; click, click, click sounded the grasshopper in the dry grass of August.

How we passed the days right before the beginning of school, riding our bikes from morning till dusk – often without using the handlebars to show off the fact we could steer by swaying our bodies.

That was, until all at once one leg of our jeans caught in the bike chain, and it was all over but the shouting … and wailing while iodine was applied to chin cuts and salve to skinned elbows.

We had two choices back then: to ride bikes in shorts and risk bloody scrapes to knees and thighs, or ride in thick, denim jeans for protection but take a chance on getting the dragging hem wound up in a greasy chain. Many the time we had to be cut out of jeans caught in the chain; thus, the term cutoffs – we suppose – that transformed long jeans into ragged shorts.

Whatever the style: rolled-up cuffs, wide legs, boot cut, ankle length, hip-slung, it didn’t matter. We wore bluejeans summer and winter – to movies, state fairs, sock-hops and football games, from the time they were brand new and stiff to later when they were faded and soft as a flannel shirt.

We ironed patches on them when the knees ripped; we replaced zippers that were stuck or buttons on the fly; we wore them with belts or suspenders or scarves draped through the waist loops. When the hems were so torn we tripped over them, out came the pinking sheers to provide a zigzagged look.

But never did we take our jeans so seriously as gals do now – and never did we try so hard to shred them, fade them, splatter paint on them, bleach them, grind them, and in general make new, expensive jeans look as though they’ve already been spun through the bicycle chain.

Sure, we kept our jeans a long time, in fact till they plain wore out and the seat split right out of them. But it didn’t enter our heads in those days to brag about how old and stretched thin they were. We were much prouder of new jeans with their dark, indigo color.

Not nowadays. In the August catalog for J. Crew women’s, four pages were devoted to jeans: painted abrasion wash jeans with worn pockets and hem for $155, “distressed look will increase with wear”; vintage wash with heavy stonewashing with bleach followed by extreme distressing, $95; “destroyed wash” hip-slung jeans, denim-patched knee, worn left knee and torn hem, “our most extreme wash with hours of drilling and grinding,” for $195; antique worn wash, “the rips on these jeans are hand-tooled,” $95.

Are we in for a fashion trend of Raggedy Anns heading back to school next week in their new but mightily broken-in jeans? Frayed so.