It’s in the jeans

It’s 1981. I’m in Marks & Spencer with my mum – it was always Marks & Spencer – probably just at the end of my school summer holiday or sometime in early September, for a much-anticipated annual event. It is time …*dah dah daah* to buy the new pair of jeans that will see me through the next 12 months.

My brother is with us too, going through the same humiliation of our mother refusing to let us take up valuable space for adults in the changing room and making us try on said jeans on the shop floor whilst proclaiming loudly “now no one is looking at you, we all look the same, so stop being so silly”, which merely served to increase our embarrassment.

And this is how it worked, every year until I was about 13. The summer-end trip to buy the jeans which would last us all year until the following summer when, our spindly ankles now poking cleanly out from beneath at least two inches of grown-out-of jeans hem, and our scabby, knobbly pre-teen knees jutting from ripped jeans leg, mum performed the final act of fashion frugality and cut down our too-short denims to make the shorts we would wear all summer until the grass-stained bums themselves gave way.

I particularly remember a beloved darkest blue pair with yellow stitching down the seams, but I also hold a nostalgia for the very fact of wearing something out, often to the very last shred. In this age of disposable fashion it’s not often that we can truly claim to have worn out an item of clothing these days. I say bring back the summer cut-offs. My dad knows what I mean. In his case, they never went away.