Abnormal Formal:

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Robots Ate My Pants
or
False Provenance Among the Arrogantly Casual

by HELEN CARTER

I have a vintage denim jacket from 1973. On the outside is a simple iron-on transfer of the Trix rabbit. But inside, it's all scrawled with graffiti, on every available inch: "Marcy 'Redhead' and Lee P." "No. 12 and Gina." and the timeless "I was drunk." It was written with different markers and messy handwriting, by real people who got drunk and slept with each other's boyfriends and had crushes on number 12. I probably would have hated these shallow drunken cheerleaders in high school, but I'm very attached to their cave drawings, the marks they made in time. They are real to me, and I am satisfied, comforted and energized to have this memento - a souvenir of someone else's lost youth.

This fondness for owning things with real history seems worlds away from the fashion, no longer new but once again made popular, of spending big money on new clothes that are already worn out for you. Distressed, destroyed jeans and fake vintage clothes - pre-digested by robots - have joined our culture's wave of casual arrogance. You know what I mean - it extends to housewares, clothing, everything we surround ourselves with. It used to be important to look rich. Now it’s important to look casual but unmistakenly crafted to appear casual, and oh yes, by the way, also rich. We all need a fine fake patina, just like we’ve learned from the Antiques Road Show, in order to be collectable. We want our furniture and trinkets and clothes from Target to appear to have arrived with a history. (I’d use the phrase Shabby Chic, but that’s a registered trademark and I don’t want no trouble. You can’t use that phrase, for instance, on ebay without the heavy hand of the law descending down upon you.)

It's difficult and expensive to destroy jeans on a large scale. Producers of jeans are competitive and secretive about their methods - it's big business. Factories were designed to mass-produce new shiny things, not to individualize them or simulate wear. Robots aren’t known for flexibility. I wonder why some of the big players don't team up with agri-business - let's says Levi's and Dole. Dole could have migrant workers do some real work in crisp new Levi's, give them back when they're worn, and send the pre-worn jeans off to the mall. Maybe the workers would get paid per pair. Or maybe Dole would keep all the money for themselves and advertise "Free Uniforms." I'll let them work out the details - I trust them to be fair....
What is our interest in simulating a life of action? You can now emerge from the tanning salon, the gym, the mall, decked out in the illusion that you work hard for a living - you've got muscles, a tan, and holes in your pants - you can even climb up into your truck that’s been sprayed with simulated off-road “dirt”. We are all the Village People now, caricatures of characters who do real work.

Of course it's all an illusion. Anyone who's run errands on the way home in their real work clothes knows it's not the ticket to a life of glamour. You smell bad, you're greasy, and no one will look you in the eye. And I don't expect a rush of people demanding authentic British working class teeth any time soon, so what's going on here?

Picture your grandchild on the Antiques Road Show of the future, with a pair of “destroyed” Abercrombie and Fitch jeans from 2005. The polite British gent with the perfect teeth will tell you “Sorry, this is a pair of fake worn jeans that were made for the tourist trade, I hope you didn’t pay much for these.” Because what’s missing here is time. It takes time to wear out a pair of jeans, like it takes time to get to know and trust someone, like it takes time to learn how to paint or do anything that’s worthwhile. If you can’t commit to liking a pair of pants long enough for them to show some wear, well, don’t buy them.
We want to have character, to be authentic, to confirm our existence and make our mark on the world. Why would we want our mark to be the safe mark of the corporate factory, simulating a non-existent other's active life? I think it’s because we crave authenticity at the same time we fear it. Real authenticity is messy, it brings us into the vast unknown of real life. I believe it requires us to engage with the life in front of us to the extent that we don't have time to look in the mirror and see if we look real. It requires us to forge a personal history as we live each day - as we eat breakfast, as we love the people near us, as we beep at stupid drivers, spilling coffee on our jeans, making our own mess, making our own life. Let's let other people revel in the details of our histories after we've made them. Let's let someone else find our jeans thirty years from now and piece it together themselves: They drank coffee, they yelled, they loved, they got drunk ... they drank coffee, they yelled, they loved, they got drunk....