the bottomline

Authenticity of and in Jeans
Thursday, May 11, 2017 by Dan Allen

So now you can purchase a pair of jeans that have fake mud on. This is not fake news. A major department store will empty your wallet of several hundred dollars to give you the look of a working person who happened to be around mud. Why?

This tips the absurdity scale for me. For a number of years I chuckled at the torn jeans women wear. Other than airing out their legs, I can see no advantage to these jeans—which, if one is not careful, will tear even more making them useless. I’m sure my age and lack of fashion are shining through, but I just don’t get it. Faded jeans may have some validity to them adding a different hue, but even these represent something they are not—a pair of jeans that have seen hard work.

I confess that as a teen I had a pair of thrift store jeans that had white bellbottoms. Literally, from the knee down it was white. Someone stitched two pairs of pants to make a monstrosity that their teen son would not wear and dumped them off at a clothing container for a sucker like me to purchase. I wore them as a joke.

The pair of jeans I have now, I’ve had for years. They may have started out as hack-around pants, but for the past umpteen years they’ve been work-around-the-outside-of-the-house drawers. I mow the grass in them. Rake leaves. Cut, split and stack wood. Shovel and blow snow. You name it—for outside work it is in these jeans which are now naturally faded with a few tears. It’s probably worth some money based on what the jean-people are selling these days not to mention the fact that it could be a two-for-one. With my size there are two pairs of pants in them.

Where’s the authenticity in what we wear? Why the pretense? You want mud on your jeans or have them faded and torn, why not actually use them to do some work.

The lack of genuineness in what one wears might be a reflection of a person who is dissatisfied with whom they actually are and wish to be something or someone they are not. Because they are not comfortable in their skin they take on whatever the fashion industry produces so that they can be hip (does that ancient term still work for today?). 

You might be able to hide behind your clothing, fooling those around you, but the Almighty sees right through the exterior of a person to their very soul. He knows who you are—there is no hiding or fooling Him. So, are you satisfied with what He sees in you? You can change that, you know . . . almost as easy as changing your jeans.


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