Big Jeans Feelings

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why do jeans make us FEEL THINGS? I mean, I have a lot of feelings about the “going out top,” but at least I no longer have to deal with it. Jeans, they’re still here in my wardrobe, making me feel uncool. It’s the actual garment, sure, but it’s also a garment in constant fashion flux — and almost always designed to fit one sort of (thin) body. There’s no one better to talk about big jeans feelings than Virginia Sole-Smith, who’s written a four-part series on ‘jean science’ and the relationship between jeans production (and jeans ‘norms’) and anti-fatness. Whether you’re clinging to your comfort jeans or trying to figure out what shoes to wear with a barrel leg or banishing jeans from your closet, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean, I think it is America and I think it is the thin ideal.
0:08.0	Jeans are this classic Americana fashion. I mean, there's just a whole history of jeans being the staple of American wardrobes that it's hard for us to imagine not existing with them.
0:23.3	Like, it would be like if we all stopped wearing underwear or something.
0:26.2	Like, it feels that foundational.
0:27.9	But like a post-World War II thing, too, right?
0:30.1	Yeah, absolutely.
0:30.4	So it's contemporary fashion feels impossible to imagine without jeans.
0:37.0	Yeah.
0:37.3	I mean, you think of like the Ralph Lauren
0:39.4	ads from the 80s when we were kids or, you know, I mean, Brooke Shields, like Calvin Klein
0:44.1	jeans. Like gene marketing is very, it looms very large in our cultural memory. And then
0:51.0	the thin ideal comes in because, as we're going to talk about, genes are incredibly
0:56.1	hard to find.
0:57.5	The less you adhere to the thin ideal, the harder your gene search will be.
1:02.3	But yet we're attracted to them because they represent the certain body type that you
1:08.2	would have in order to, quote, look good in jeans. Yeah. So we're
1:12.1	attracted to the jeans themselves and we're attracted to the body we think we need to have in order
1:16.8	to wear the jeans. This is the Culture Study podcast and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm
1:26.9	Virginia Sol Smith. I wrote the burnt toast newsletter, host the burnt toast podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Virginia Sill-Smith.
1:28.1	I wrote the burnt-toast newsletter, host the burnt-toast podcast, and I'm the author of That Talk.
1:32.8	Okay, so we got so many questions for this episode.
1:36.0	So we're going to be talking about trends, about feelings, about quality, all of it.
	...

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