“You need new pants.”
That’s how it started. That’s how a perfectly innocent Sunday afternoon was run over and placed in critical condition by four careless, but completely truthful words.
If it had been any other piece of clothing, everything would have been fine but pants require ten times the amount of effort and patience than anything else found in a man’s wardrobe.
Sure, buying a proper suit can take a lot more out of a day but in the end you’re getting a suit — a celebration of design meets fabric meets attitude. And despite what Dockers would have you believe, pants never got the job, the girl — nor have pants ever won the war.
Buying pants is a process always promoted as, “this will just take a minute” but the savvy male knows one minute can quickly hemorrhage into thirty minutes if you’re lucky, or an hour if there’s any type of sale being held.
Take a look at the buying pants checklist:
- Take off shoes while hopping on one foot
- Unhinge belt
- Unzip, unbutton
- Remove pants
- Put new pants on
- Adjust underwear (you can skip this step if wearing tighty whighties)
- Shake pant legs and force hands in pockets
- Leave changing room
- Model pants for wife and or personal shopper
- Walk, walk, turn, and turn around the other way, lift shirt, turn around again, walk
- Return to phone booth sized dressing “room”
- Unzip, unbutton
- Remove pants
- If pants were approved go to step 16, if not continue to step 15
- Wait 12 minutes while wife or personal shopper finds a new pair, go back to step 4
- Put old pants back on
- Put shoes back on
- Take 1 minute for a cool down
- Return to wife/personal shopper
- Spend money
That’s three more steps required than it takes to launch the Space Shuttle! Now I ask you, who wouldn’t rather be cruising space instead of trying on one more pair of relaxed fit, plain front, khakis.
What really makes buying new pants difficult is poor fabrication. It’s quite remarkable how one pair of pants can be nothing like it’s identical twin. The tags advertise the same height and width but even the personal shopper at Nordstroms will tell you that it’s always a good idea to try on each pair because, “you just never know.”
If we can clone mammals then why in the hell can’t clothing manufacturers figure out how to fabricate identical clothes?
The Scots know this all to well and were smart enough to forget pants altogether. You don’t even have to take off your shoes to try on a kilt.