Author: Otto

Fashion gone berserk

Okay, this is just ludicrous.

Too lazy to paint a house yourself?
Too lazy to paint a house yourself?

That’s right kiddies, JCrew sells pre-paint stained jeans. For those people too lazy to paint a house, now you can look like you’ve actually been working too, but without all that pain in the ass “labor”.

I understood the patched jeans fad. The scuffed torn thing, I got. The wrong size thing was weird to me, and god help me I even understand stone-washed. But this is simply too far out there for me. Not because of the look, although they look terrible, but because of the price.

Those jeans cost $285.

That’s right. Take one $60-$80 pair of jeans, add $1 worth of white paint, and charge $285 for it.

Note the salesmanship tactics they use in the description. Emphasis is mine:

A hand-crafted collector’s item in authentic selvedge cotton denim from one of Japan’s oldest and most renowned mills. We spend hours on each pair to create a unique jean for the most discerning denim connoisseur, so we have only a handful available—and no two are quite alike. Each one is made with denim woven on the original 100-year-old narrow looms. Each pair is stonewashed, hand-distressed, hand-splattered with paint and hand-finished, giving it the kind of character only individual attention can impart. Button fly. Traditional five-pocket styling, with reinforced back pockets. Import. Machine wash. Catalog/jcrew.com only.

My questions about this copy are two-fold:

  1. Who the hell considers themselves to be a “discerning denim connoisseur”?
  2. I wonder if this sort of sales pitch really obscures the fact that you’re paying damn near $300 for a pair of pre-ruined jeans?

Weekend update

So you might have noticed the pictures I posted this weekend. Well, actually, you didn’t until this morning because my blog was broken and so the “live” pictures got sort of stuck between Flickr and the site.

Still, I sent a few from the weekend to try to get into the whole picture blogging thing again. It’s always a lot of fun to snap some shots, and since I got Flickr posting them to the blog instantly, I figured I’d give it a shot this weekend while I was at the Publympics. Paul emailed us all asking for judges, and I volunteered. Hey, free beer and lots of pain? Sign me up!

One thing I did learn was that if I’m going to be outside in the heat all day drinking, then wearing sunblock is not optional. The other thing I learned is that it is actually possible for a human being to sweat beer like in one of those Gatorade commercials. Beer. Is it in you?

On the whole, a good time. I don’t recall who won, but quite frankly, everybody won. By the end, I don’t even think there were enough teams still around to do the tricycle races, and so I left just before that point. When they busted out the yards and started chugging (not on the list of events, BTW), then I figured that it was all over bar the puking.

Heavy college deja-vu.

BBQ Festival

So I haven’t gotten around to writing in a while, but I have an excuse. I’ve been extremely busy.

Last week was the Memphis in May World Championship BBQ Festival. This year, I joined the Ques Brothers team instead of just going to their tent and mooching off them. What this meant was a fair amount of work building the booth/tent/location, eating a lot of BBQ, drinking a lot of frosty beverage, and even bartending for a night.

While I didn’t manage to get the quality of pictures that Paul did, I did manage to snap a few shots on my cell phone here and there. You can find them on my Facebook page. For Paul’s large, large number of pictures, check his PicasaWeb page. You’ll find several of me drinking, dancing, and debauching the nights away.

The important news is that the team won third place in the shoulder competition. I tasted a bit of this prize winning shoulder, and it was easily the best pork I’ve ever had. Amazing stuff. Our head cook, Willie, got 12th last year in his first year in the festival, and then moved it on up to 3rd in only his second year. This is basically unheard of. Many teams go for 10 or more years without breaking into the top ten. So, major props to the cook. And if you’re in Chicago, go try his restaurant and tell him the Ques Brothers sent you, and congratulate him on his victory.

css.php