It's all about the jeans

By Libby Copeland
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - At a boutique where denim dreams come true and almost no one is bigger than a size 10, a woman flags down a salesgirl and confides a terrible problem.

"You don't have a butt?" asks the salesgirl.

"Like, at all," the woman says.

This is as close to an emergency as you can get in the premium-denim world. From the rows and rows of bluejeans, which stretch to the right and left, from floor to ceiling, the salesgirl pulls a pair of Rock & Republic's with high back pockets, designed to magically lift and shape all that is droopy or flat.

There are nearly 30 brands here at B Scene: jeans with small pockets and big pockets and specially angled pockets, jeans with close-together pockets that make a wide butt narrower, jeans with no yoke to make a butt extra round. There are rhinestoned and embroidered pockets to call attention to your butt, and plain pockets to make your butt disappear.

Everyone has a different theory about how to solve the world's butt problems.

"There's so much controversy," says Ilana Kashdin, who once planned to be a doctor and now co-owns this boutique, where she studies the anatomy of denim and the derriere.

Whether you're paying $145 or $520 for premium denim, you want to get the butt right. Every woman does that half-twirl at the mirror, back arched, head craned around. If the jeans are right, the experience is transformative, like putting on a magic cloak.

She says, "Oh. Muh-god."

For a while we were stuck in a dark place, our jeans tragically utilitarian. We bought them in stores decorated with hay bales. We fooled with acid washes and elastic waists. We had poor pocket technology. We had no choice.

Then came beauty, so much beauty. (And status, too, but we'll try that on later.) Now we are clad in the sanctified denim of the 21st century, a pragmatic, pioneer material made decadently new. From our perfect behinds, we can see the future.

In suburban Potomac, Md., B Scene is the province of cute teen-agers and hot moms. They come for sequined shrugs and $120 metallic sandals, velour sweatshirt-and-skirt ensembles ($275), tube tops made of terry cloth. ("Isn't this the material you make towels with?" asks a young man, and the young woman he's with calls him an idiot.)

And they come for the jeans, found in the back third of the store, where a ladder is propped so Ilana can reach the tippy-top shelves.

Premium denim is a tiny percentage of the overall jeans market, but you wouldn't know it from the profusion of brands here. A disproportionate number have names that sound less like fashion lines and more like spiritual causes that Hollywood actors might get involved in. There's True Religion and Blue Cult, Citizens of Humanity and 7 for All Mankind. This makes a certain sense; the notion of denim-as-transcendence will ring true to any woman who has ever looked in the mirror and not recognized her own blue-clad behind.

What if we all adored our backsides? Would we achieve harmony with our bodies? Could this translate to a higher level of consciousness? Are the jeans of the 21st century helping us get there, or making sure we never do?

"I live for jeans," says Becca Walker, 33, who has 20 to 30 pairs and recently bought some made by People for Peace that cost $285 and have the word LOVE embroidered on the butt. These made Becca an object of envy. Women at her son's nursery school were "stalking" her. Her neighbor bought a pair. Walker thinks the jeans were totally worth the money. "I felt a little nauseous afterwards and then I was OK," she says.

At B Scene there are dark jeans for nights out and light jeans for days in. There are white jeans with pink stitching and blue ones with turquoise-colored stones. There are jeans with worn hems to mimic the look you'd get if you let them drag under your flip-flops. There are jeans with wire in the back pockets to give them a perpetually wrinkled look. There's a style called "ripper," with the bottoms and pockets all shredded, and a style with the apocalyptic description "destroyed." There are maternity jeans with a little pouch for the belly. Soon Ilana will be getting shipments of baby jeans, costing $80 to $180, and some extra-fancy adult jeans for $695.

Occasionally, in comes a newcomer to the premium denim world. This can be exhilarating and scary, like going to a foreign country without knowing a word of the native tongue.

"Did you want, like, daytime, nighttime, go both ways?" Ilana asks. "Beat up, not beat up? Does a particular wash catch your eye?"

"I think, whatever?" the woman says.

The newbies often don't know one of the cardinal rules: If they're stretch jeans, buy them small. They'll feel tight at first but then they'll expand "half a size," Ilana says. If a woman isn't willing to buy her jeans this way, Ilana informs her she may have to wash and dry the jeans before each wearing. This is arduous, though not as time-consuming and expensive as dry-cleaning, which some other jeans require.

Ilana, 31 but lithe as a teen, is perfect for the denim lines she carries. Her jeans don't come with a waist size bigger than 32, so if you're larger than a 10 or 12, you're out of luck. (Heftier women may suffer the indignity of being pointed to the store's small collection of men's jeans.)

At the new Denim Bar in suburban Arlington, Va., where the saleswomen dress like bartenders and you may get a free Yuengling if they like you, the owner says he sometimes turns customers away.

"You're just not ready to try on designer jeans," Mauro Farinelli tells them. Certain women try on pair after pair of premium denim and look great, but still complain. They're just not prepared, it seems, to be fabulous.

"We'll be here," Mauro tells them, hoping they'll come to their senses one day and allow him to fulfill their sartorial destiny.

No one would begrudge Mauro his noble cause. Premium denim is not just about beauty; it's about feeling entitled to be beautiful. It's about broadcasting your worth through the Swarovski crystals on your behind. Jeans have become diamonds, art, custom cars. Spend the rent money on a pair, by all means, but do not simply wear them. Know that you are wearing the Degas of denim.

Mauro, then, is an educator. He has studied tailoring and likes to talk about triple-stitching. His store is all dark wood and fine denim, some of it woven on decades-old looms, then blessed with hand-painted logos. Some jeans are so fancy they come in boxes or leather pouches. The most expensive are $645, though Mauro also sells "entry-level" jeans for $100.

Mauro has women who have followed him since his last gig, as a jeans specialist at Saks Fifth Avenue. They say he makes them look amazing. Mauro is equally loyal. He says of one customer, "She buys anything I tell her to buy."

Denim was sober and utilitarian, a thing of the 19th century, a tough fabric for tough men, meant to be worn lots and worn down.

Now it is worn down by our own fussiness. It is washed, sandblasted, hand-sanded, treated with resin. Mauro owns jeans that came with the outline of a chewing-tobacco tin already etched into the back pocket, like ready-made manhood. He's wearing them when a tough-looking man comes out of a Denim Bar dressing room looking gleeful.

"They're hugging my buns!" the man says.

The buns are the anchor of the premium-denim world, and not just because a good pair of jeans will make them look fabulous. ("We don't want any muffin tops," Mauro says mysteriously.)

The backside of a pair of jeans broadcasts your status, and hard-core denimheads will instantly recognize the meaning of each obscure squiggle stitched into a back pocket. It's a tribal marking. It tells you if the owner is wearing a pair of 7 for All Mankind jeans, signaling that she may be mainstream, a girl who follows her friends. It tells you if she's wearing Paige jeans, suggesting she reads InStyle religiously and emulates Jennifer Aniston. Or she may flaunt the hand-painted logo of Evisu jeans, meaning she paid, oh, $520 for them. This signals that she's loaded.

Mauro is a slender, curly-haired guy in his early thirties with a knack for blunt talk. His favorite word is that elegant three-letter word for rear-end, and he often will compliment a customer on hers if it looks good in a pair of jeans she's trying. He will also tell her if it doesn't.

Sometimes, in an attempt to explain the complex science of denim, Mauro will say things like, "You can have a girl with a huge ass" who looks good in one type of jeans, while "another girl, equally titanic," looks better in a different pair.

"Pocketless jeans are the worst, though," he says with disgust.

(Begin optional trim)

These days, Mauro is extremely fond of "raw" jeans, made from virgin denim that has never been washed or treated. Four to five days a week, he wears a particular pair of raw jeans. He has been wearing them like this for more than three months and won't even dream of washing them till it's been six.

Mauro gives a lot of men his pitch on raw denim. He says men are more receptive to breaking in raw jeans because they're more "patient," though it also could also be that they're less turned off by the notion of wearing dirty pants. (On the Web site for a raw jeans maker called Nudie, men ask what to do if their jeans start to smell. The site advises them to put them in the freezer.)

Raw denim is really dark blue and stiff at first, and in the beginning it tends to bleed onto white sneakers and light-colored couches. But after six months of near-constant wear, Mauro says, the jeans will fit him perfectly and will have faded in all the right places. There will be "whiskering" around his crotch and "honeycombing" behind the knees.

"This jean will be unique to me," Mauro says.