Second-hand wonder shorts
My father wears Cheap Mondays. I’ll let that sink in for a bit.
That’s right, my fifty-something year old father spends a fair portion of his life, legs squeezed like a pair of anemic sausages, into some trendy Swedish tubes of denim. I’ve learned to accept the fact that, from the back, my father frequently resembles the long-lost balding member of The Horrors. I’ve also learned to accept that his legs are better than mine.
My father discovering his inner trendy Swede, however, hasn’t been all bad. Long before the Cheap Monday era came the epoch of trying on my Sass & Bide jeans in moments of nostalgic “I miss sixties stovepipes and my lustrous locks!” hysteria. Better resembling an aging member of a mediocre over-hyped indie band than your twenty year-old daughter, I suppose. And fair play, the rediscovery of the skinny jean had left twenty years worth of Levi 501s in Dad’s wardrobe, never to be worn by their too-cool owner again, all in varying degrees of paint-stain, sweat and faded nonchalance. In other words, ripe for the cutting.
Just when the going got tough for Dad’s delightful old denim though, my fabric scissors poised glinting on the verge of creating a deliciously worn-in pair of cut-offs (requisite Sydney Summer regalia, you see), he succumbed to all the sissy sentiment that a pair of tight black jeans suggests. Snatching them from my grip, which was tight with the expectation of DIY, he placed the jeans and their twenty or so siblings on the very top shelf of his wardrobe. “You probably shouldn’t cut them up, Lil,” he said, “they’re my favourites.”
“Dad, you have a load, and you never wear them!”
“Maybe, but I love them.”
I suppose I could wrap this up metaphorically, claiming it to be an allegory for wanting to preserve memories of the past. I could use it as a bridging-the-generations story, about how the best designs are perennial, how they survive and continue to have life breathed into them in successive decades. But, in the end, this is just a story about how the promise of the perfect denim cut-offs was cruelly dangled in front of me by a father too trendy for his own good, and how I thought my bum was fated never to be clad in vintage denim so perfectly high waisted it could be deemed criminal.
It’s been years now since the 501 incident. My father remains devoted to jeans so tight his mobility is limited to a mere shuffle, and the Levis sit, the aroma of moth balls now irrevocably entrenched, unworn on the top shelf. A relic of his daggy mid-nineties days. I have spent many a melancholy afternoon gazing longingly at the cut-offs that never were, legs stuffed into some mediochre store-bought denim without the subtle nuances brought on by years of blood, sweat and spilt beers that only vintage denim provides.
Those days, however, are over. For just as the days have begun to get shorter, just as the chill of an impending Autumn starts hitting the mornings, I have found my darlings hidden in a local charity shop- faded to within an inch of their frankly probably unimpressive lives (up to now, of course), button fly trailing far up past my bellybutton, the most trashy-fabulous pair of denim shorts ever known to this tush.
Let’s hope my father doesn’t try to take them for a spin.
