BDG DENIM BOYFRIEND JACKET: SOLD OUT.
This is the sad face on the Urban Outfitters website, which, luckily, is still loaded with boyfriend shirts, blazers, jeans and tees.
The boyfriend garment appeared on the runway in 2010 and quickly became a staple at stores like Forever 21, Gap and H&M.
Its style logic is sound: pairing baggy with tight items creates a classic silhouette, something like a fitted jacket with a bumping peplum or a wasp-waisted skirt loaded with crinoline. But the emotional logic! This is a maudlin scene.
To wear the boyfriend jean is to recreate or often imagine that sexy, girlie moment when you grab whatever pants are crumpled by the bed in the morning and fetchingly go make coffee while pulling at the too-large, man-redolent garment.
But this is an authentic experience. Boyfriend jeans, which are equal parts fit (let’s face it: they are huge jeans in smaller sizes) and simulated memory, are straight out of Total Recall.
Here is the marketing logic: Are you chunky and single? Belt on a pair of our jeans and drift around all day feeling as if you, like every rom-com queen, had to borrow your man’s pants – and don’t they look wrong and so right?
Luckily, women, skinny or not, have already migrated to skinny jeans, which have enough give to fit anyone and which look like your own damn pants.
Is there a gender bias written in invisible ink on the crotch seam of the boyfriend jean? Yes, of course there is. And to prove it, I asked hundreds and hundreds of people to model their girlfriend’s jeans.
Usually people are pumped to appear in a story, but not this time. There were so few responses, I had to look back at my call for submissions to make sure it didn’t say, “Please staple your woman’s jeans to your scrotum.”
One girl coolly informed me, “Wearing your girlfriend’s jeans” was a big deal 10 years ago, “with the scene kids and the emo groups.” But that trend is about wearing the tightest jeans possible, not lounging around, imagining you just had a nooner with the owner of the size 26 Citizens of Humanity Cherie flares.
Eventually, four bold men and one very bold lady came forward. What follows are their pictures and remarks.
Colin Campbell, animator, posed in his performance-artist girlfriend’s Julie Bot’s jeans. The divine Julie explains that they are an anomaly, as she is the physically larger of the two. (I beg to differ, as almost every woman I know has experienced slipping on her BF’s jeans and then pulling, tearing and weeping trying to get them on.)
“The bottoms are rugged and durable enough,” Campbell says, “but their function is somewhat hampered by having to hold them up with one hand.”
He threw on one of Bot’s tops, as well, and liked the “wide, open-air V-neck for letting [his] manly pecs breathe and the unheard-of option of being able to show off [one’s] shoulders. The tops, while difficult by guy standards to actually get into, are flowy and nice.”
Look at him looking in the mirror: he knows he’s looking good, breaking all the rules!
As does writer and artist Evan Munday, the author and illustrator of The Dead Kids’ Detective Agency (ECW). He’s not sweating a thing (unlike the many anonymous males who told my female friends “NOT A CHANCE,” when asked to pose).
Munday explains: “I started wearing my (now ex-) girlfriend’s jeans a couple of years into our relationship. At first it was just kind of a cute, comfort thing, like when I’d wear her sweatshirt. It’s nice to be surrounded in the stuff of someone you love. But then I realized I liked the way her Diva-cut jeans fit way better than any of my own jeans. I started exclusively buying women’s jeans after that.”
He finds the entire discourse around boyfriend-wear “weirdly cisnormative.” “Who doesn’t wear at least some articles of clothing from the other gender?” he asks. “And why not?”
Evan Munday
Why not, indeed. A cis-female, I have always had access to massive shirts and Frankenstein suits and more. But you ask a cis-male to get the Jordache look and all hell breaks loose.
Not so with Neil St-Denis, an environmental officer who happily clambered into his girlfriend’s, stand-up comic Lucy Cappiello, jeans.
As fantastic as he looks, he had some mild critiques: “I feel like I have tiny stork legs,” he says. Still, he felt comfortable and searing hot: “I wouldn’t mind some stretch in the ball area of men’s jeans. It’s weird to look down and see polka dots.”
“Those dots though,” says Cappiello. “The polka dots make this skin-tight seduction in my Capri lady jeans. We all want to strip my man, now, yes? Yes. Burn in hell, boyfriend-cut jeans.”
Gazing at Neil’s dotted rear-side, I share her fiery sentiment.
Neil St-Denis
Finally, photographer Bond Blackwell and his young lesbian girlfriend, the visual artist Chaase Dylan, whose identity is hotly boyish, tried on each other’s jeans.
They then interviewed each other while wearing them and doing chores, way over on the north end of Vancouver Island, in Woss.
Bond: “I feel my ass looks pretty sexy…You know, like doin’ a little bit of cleaning up, tidying up… whole range of emotions, really, I could’ve cried…I’ve gained an understanding of the differences in the design in men’s versus women’s…no way those would have allowed for uh, testicular activity . . .Chaase, how did you feel?”
Chaase: “Drafty, haha. Uhm, guess it’s time to do some soul searching… People often mistake me for a pre-pubescent teenage boy – usually I’m wearing women’s skinny jeans (or as I like to call them “chastity pants”). I should probably just wear these all the time instead and allow circulation back into my shins.”
These five advanced souls prove both the stupidity of gendered clothing while advancing the radical thought that we should shop freely, and boldly cross gender barriers anywhere from Walmart to Holt Renfrew.
They also, in their sweet insouciance, indicate that they are not fabricating a life to go with these jeans: they’re just trying them on.
Show us how you look in your partner’s jeans! Email us at website@nowtoronto.com with a pic and a blurb about how you feel.
website@nowtoronto.com | @TheForce777
