When You Believe...in Jeans

INNER MONOLOGUES April 3, 2012—REBIRTH
When You Believe…in Jeans
by Alexis Barad-Cutler

A few weeks before my best friend Lindsay and I entered seventh grade at a new school, our moms took us shopping for Back to School Fashions at The Limited Too. I just knew that with my brand new wardrobe, it was going to be a banner year.
Allow me to describe just a few of the outfits I bought during that particular day’s shopping excursion: A scoop neck bodysuit with a men’s style vest. A button-down shirt with a skinny tie and fedora. A bright yellow tennis skirt with shiny new Doc Martins that I couldn’t wait to pair with my prized Tommy The Who hat.
And of course, half a dozen pairs of baggy jeans in all the colors of the rainbow if the rainbow resembled one of the “special” Crayola boxes, with colors like Atomic Tangerine, Electric Lime and Jazzberry Jam.
The night before school, Lindsay and I meticulously planned our outfits. Outfits that would tell everyone: “We may be new to this school, but we are ready to take you by storm. Look at us in our badass bodysuits worn with baggy jeans, suspenders and long earrings in the shape of parrots or sleepy kittens.” The impression we were after was “Fly Girl Chic”.
So imagine our surprise when we looked around during Student Orientation and noticed that we looked well, a little different from our peers. It seemed that our new classmates hadn’t read up on the Top Looks You Can’t Live Without list from YM Magazine that fall. The style was more Kurt Cobain than Tori Spelling. But the clothing item that puzzled me the most was the jeans. They were faded in some spots, torn in others. They flared at the bottom, and sometimes had holes where they’d been stepped on too much. The most popular girls had versions that were skin-tight on the hips and thighs, and then loose and worn in from the knees down.
I looked down at the Salmon-Surprise-colored jeans I was wearing and saw them in an entirely new light. These jeans were too high waisted, too baggy in the crotch, too bunchy at the knees, and way too short ever since we’d taken them to get hemmed by that nice Irish lady who despite my many attempts at correcting her, always insists on calling me Alice.
As we went through our orientation “trust” exercises—the kind where you have to close your eyes and hope that all your new “friends” will catch you--I could feel people’s curious stares. I was an outsider. I might as well have walked into school wearing a Big Bird outfit with a sign that said “New Girl”.
That night I tore through my closet in search of clothing that might somewhat echo the uniform it seemed everyone else was wearing. It seemed like all my shirts were either embroidered, tie-dyed, or ruffled like a pirate. Didn’t I own just one plain flannel shirt? No. No I did not.
Over the next week, using clothes from my dad’s closet, I cobbled together a few hopeless attempts at grunge. People must have smelled my insecurity because before long I was sitting by myself in the Nature Sanctuary during Science class, picking the small twigs and pieces of grass out of my hair that my classmates had thrown at me.
Lindsay wasn’t faring any better. At the time, she wore her long hair in side braids. Someone had decided that she looked like Daria from Beavis and Butthead and started chanting “Diarrhea cha cha cha!” whenever either of us walked by.
We started getting so harassed that the only safe zone was behind our locker doors, where we pretended to fix our bangs in front of our Lisa Frank mirrors.
After my makeunder, I did the next obvious thing a super dorky person does in order to change her peer’s opinions of them for the better: I decided to run for Class President.
“Vote for me and I will put an end to bullying in the hallways” was my platform. Someone threw a spitball at me during my speech, and even though the voting was blind, I knew Lindsay didn’t even vote for me because I only had one vote. My own.
And then, in the girl’s bathroom one day at school, someone mentioned having gone to a store named Udelco that past weekend to buy something called “used jeans”. Now this was surprising. Who would want to wear jeans that were old? Wasn’t the whole point to buy something new?
Despite my mother’s affirmations that I was “beautiful” and my outfits were “stunning” my mom and I drove in circles that night, trying to find this elusive store. I wondered if perhaps I was too much of a loser to even be able to locate the store, let alone shop in it. Finally, in a place where one might imagine the cast of Law & Order discovering a dead body--next to the woods and near all the big garbage receptacles--there it was. The Mecca of Used Jeans.
We walked in and immediately my mom made a face. It smelled like a mix between mildew and dirty crotch.
I went home that night with two pairs of “new” used jeans and hung them up carefully in my closet. The next day, no one would recognize me. I’d walk into school with my perfectly tight and faded jeans, and my brand new vintage flannel shirt, and suddenly I’d be invited to Jessica Gershon's birthday party and Veronica Salzberg would stop asking me if the crops were good this year since that one time I’d worn overalls with one of the straps hanging down. Boys would stop asking me if I carried tampons in my Rainbow Brite purse. (Which, btw, was actually my mom’s old Farragamo, but that’s beside the point and also btw, regarding the tampons, no, because I hadn’t gotten my period yet.)
I walked to my locker the next morning feeling like Cindy Crawford in my new used jeans. Two boys stopped their conversation, looked at me, and mimicked someone picking their nose. I may have had new jeans, but my fate as SuperNerd had already been sealed. You can give a girl new clothes, but you can’t change who she is inside I guess.
Fast-forward about twenty years, to a few weeks ago. There I was, looking into store windows for the first time since giving birth to my son. I’d shied away from buying anything that didn’t have an elastic waist for some months, but it was finally time to purchase a nice pair of new jeans and stop dressing like a Sweatpant Mom.
And it seemed, in nearly every cute boutique I looked, were the jeans of yore. Jeans in colors like Azure, Mango Tango, and Wild Blue Yonder. Could it be?
My inner thirteen year old was going, “Oh yes! Yes please! You know you want them. You’ve ALWAYS wanted them. You just let those other kids convince you that you didn’t. Buy them. I promise to do my homework first before watching Tiny Toons!”
I selected a pair in an inoffensive blush pink. Nothing too loud and certainly not enough to fully satisfy the ‘tween in me who longed to finally wear those prized Fall Fashions with pride. But just enough to tell her that she’d had it right the first time around. Skinny ties and scoop-neck bodysuits ARE hot, as long as you BELIEVE they are.
And to quote a woman whose music was inspirational to me during those dark tweenage days:

There can be miracles
When you believe
When you believe
Though hope is frail
It’s hard to kill
Mmm

Who knows what miracles
You can achieve
When you believe somehow you will
You will, when you believe…