A lot of people have commented on George Will’s recent commentary on Blue Jeans and the Fall of Western Society. Will was taking points from Daniel Akst’s Down With Denim. No reason I shouldn’t join in, too.

Akst and Will both try to make aesthetic, practical, and cultural points against jeans as the flashpoint of our culture’s inability to dress itself. The problem with this is that aesthetics are valid but subjective, they’re wrong on practicality, and the cultural significance of jeans is no longer what it once was and it doesn’t so much matter what it once was as it does what it presently is.

The real problem with jeans, from a culturally conservative perspective, is their ubiquity. Akst does a pretty good job of pointing this out, but Will mostly misses the boat on it because he just dislikes them so too much to bother coming up with good reasons why. The ubiquity is a problem, though, for the same reason that cultural history is not.

The main point of dressing in particular clothes is that they are signifiers. They tell us something about us and how we view an occasion. If we’re dressing in a suit and tie we are declaring that this is important and that we expect that. If we go to something where a suit and tie is significant, refusing to wear such, we are signaling a rebellion against the code. Or laziness or clueless. How we perceive these clothes clothes are the main cultural point. That jeans used to be an act of rebellion is somewhat irrelevant when it comes to their current application. Jeans currently signal comfort and casualness over formality.

We can expect a conservative like Will to be horrified as such mass displays of casualness. And I’m not unsympathetic. Whether this truly represents a cultural problem is a matter of what we think that culture should be. Those who would prefer a greater degree of formality understandably detest this trend. Similarly, I am discomforted by the increasing trend of girls and young women wearing what seem to be pajama bottoms out in public. Or people that wear sweats everywhere. On the other hand, if 40 years down the line (God help us) everybody is doing these things, the future arguments I have with my future daughter turn to mud.

But we’ve reached the point where jeans’ ubiquity don’t really represent anything at all. We have jeans that are so tight as to be uncomfortable and others that are made too large. Jeans make so little of a statement that you have to sub-signal. The kinds of jeans you make are the statement. Will admits as much when he talks about those jeans that come out 0f the factory looking like they have already been worn. Those are now what represent casualness. Jeans, ironically, now more represent conformity than anything else.

I say this as that guy that never wore jeans in school up until I forced myself in late junior high. For some of the same reasons that Akst gives. They are hot and uncomfortable in the long Delosian summers (spanning from April to October) where I was raised. They always seemed itchy. So when we were banned from wearing shorts to school, I wore slacks. At this point, I was being the rebel. Unfortunately, the kind of rebellion that you pay a social cost for. Will should approve of the fact that I paid a price for bucking convention.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come around on the jeans front as they pertain to me. In the cool weather up here, they provide a little extra warmth compared to most of the slacks and cargos I wear. Some of the discomfort I experienced when I was younger is gone now, probably due in part to “relaxed fit” jeans that fit my legs better. And I think I got used to the way that they rub against my legs. Now I see the upsides of jeans. They don’t significantly wrinkle. They’re flexible to go with whatever shirt you happen to have handy. Even if it weren’t the norm, it’s probably what I would wear when appropriate.

Of course, some of the things that I like about them are the things that people like Will and Akst don’t. The fact that they’re easy and don’t need to be ironed means that I don’t have to put much effort into it and are thus inferior. It’s the male equivalent to the female need to make dressing as complicated (and uncomfortable) as possible. It shows effort. And, of course, that they go well with anything could be turned around to say that they don’t really go with anything.

I’m sort of sympathetic to that last part. The problem with jeans is the ubiquity. Or at least how jeans symbolize the ubiquity of modern dress. In my perfect world, we would have one type of clothes to wear on our downtime, another to work, another to church, and so on. When I was a kid, I had to dress nicely for church. I objected strenuously. Ties have always been particularly uncomfortable around my big neck, who the heck wants to wear a jacket in the southern heat, and so on. By the time I was graduating from high school and when I would go to church afterward, this custom had relaxed and young people were coming to church in jeans and later {gasp} shorts. I welcomed the development at the time, but now I see what Mom was talking about.

Now we can wear the same clothes to work and church that we might want to wear on the weekend. I feel sort of robbed of the chance to dress like an adult. I don’t dress exactly as I did when I was younger (worse, back then I didn’t wear jeans!), I rarely wear t-shirts, for instance. But I usually dress within a comfortable range. I dress for work wearing the same sorts of things that the janitor wears and the auto guy wears. My employer wouldn’t fire me for wearing a suit-and-tie to work, but the symbols of my progression in life have become pretense. I share with Will and Akst a sense of loss in that.

That is where I do feel a sense of common cause with those scolds. Dressing up and dressing down may be arbitrary cultural dictates, but I do think that such things are important. There’s a reason we don’t dress in togas or African robes, after all. I think that targeting jeans is a big misguided, particularly on the grounds that they do.

On the other hand, if I really want differentiation-in-dress, I guess we do still see that. Most offices (my current withstanding) don’t yet allow employees to show up in shorts and flip-flops. The young girls wearing pajama pants are doing some differentiation of their own, however-much I disapprove and will forbid my future daughters from doing the same. Somehow, I doubt that Akst will approve of this any more than I do. So I guess in that sense I am trapped in the same sort of thinking that they are. A preference for a more classical look losing, day-by-day, in the face of modern culture.