Can You Spend $500 on Jeans and Still Have a Social Conscience?

As was prescribed by my hipster consultant Zevon, I lay in a bathtub of freezing water for two hours wearing a brand new pair of $200 “Ralf Dry Selvage” Nudie jeans. This baptism was essential, Zevon said, to show that I was serious about making sure my Nudie jeans contoured my thighs and buttocks optimally. Lying in the cold bath and listening to NPR reports about the persecution of educated women in Tehran and starving children in the Sudan, my conscience painfully pricked me because all this time I was spending “personalizing” my Nudie jeans, I was questioning Zevon’s expertise: He prescribed the cold bath method, but I had read on a Nudie message board that an overnight soak in hot water was actually better.

As I contemplated the hipster subculture sitting in front of their Apple computers and scouring the Nudie jeans message boards, I recognized a painful hipster paradox: To be cool requires vanity, self-absorption, and a ferocious attention to fashion detail on one hand. On the other hand, the hipster must show a superior social conscience by leaving a small carbon footprint, by patronizing local organic produce sellers, by boycotting companies on the hipster hit list and by making an annual pilgrimage to an impoverished locale where he and other hearty souls build houses for the homeless. The gulf between customizing a pair of $200 jeans and writing a $500 check to my local animal rescue was a huge one and I felt that the attempt to reconcile these opposite hipster impulses to be a feeble one. From the freezing tub, I called Zevon and described to him my dilemma.

“There is no dilemma or conflict between style and social conscience,” Zevon explained to me over his iPhone. “They exist in a happy marriage. And if you doubt me, may I refer you to hipster extraordinaire, Bernard-Henri Levi.” This French spokesman, activist, humanitarian, contrarian, and best-selling author was the consummate hipster. Well dressed, articulate, mediatique,  he had through his writings and speeches exposed the evils of the world while his sartorial insouciance was an implicit admonishment of the barbarian hordes.

“Don’t you see?” Zevon continued. “Bernard-Henri Levi and our new President both have a lot in common. Exquisite in fashion and using their social conscience to call upon our higher angels.”

I told Zevon I had to get off the phone. My thighs were beginning to chafe and the cold bath seemed to have given me a case of the sniffles or something worse. All this time in an ice cold bathtub had rendered my “higher angels” comatose inside some deep freeze. I needed to thaw.

 

Comments

[jk]

good lord! and you're rating radios with a "manliness" score? get an R-388 or R-390 and be done wih it. Until you've owned one you don't know what a manly radio is !

[Jesse Menn]

I own a pair of shrink-to-fit Levi's, meaning I've done the bath thing. I also work at an organization that promotes energy efficiency, sustainable, and the such.

[Jeffrey McMahon]

Jesse, you should review jeans with a sustainable angle.

KR, please send me a review of the R-388 and/or R-390. Are those Tecsun models?

[Jesse Menn]

Uhh... I can recommend energy efficient power supply units for your computer, but beyond that, I'm pretty dimwitted when it comes to sustainability.

[Jeffrey McMahon]

I have no right to talk about sustainability. I eat enough food every day for 4 people.

[KR]

jeff, i think he is talking collins radios maybe. old tube ones.

http://www.oldradios.co.nz/gallery/anchors/COLLINS%20R-388%20URR%201-30%20MHz.jpg

[Jeffrey McMahon]

What an austere looking beast of a radio. Even too austere for me.

[Ed]

If I want something that looks like that, I'll buy an old Diathermy machine.

[Angelo]

This is actually very easy to reconcile. Hollywood celebrities talk about the need for all of us to conserve and sacrafice---but they spend in five or six figures to outfit themselves for an awards show for one night. A certain failed politician who acts as a spokesman for the fight against global warming flies back and forth between continents in a gulfstream jet, spewing more carbon than my family will be responsible for in a decade---and he lives in a compound with one other person---digs that could house six families. Apparently, you can do a lot of things and still have a social or environmental conscience as long as you talk a lot and convince people that you're a lot smarter than you actually are.