Big Jeans Feelings

Culture Study Podcast

Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 789 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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.Show Notes:Virginia’s *FOUR-PART* JEAN SCIENCE SERIES!!!*Our previous episode with Amanda Mull re: why clothes suck nowFollow anti-diet stylist Dacy Gillespie (mindfulcloset) on InstagramThe Universal Standard Ponte Pant! (there are several)Corrine Fay tries the swim romperKatie Sturino does a jeans try-on round-upJordache jeans ads from the 70s, 80s, and 90sFollow Virginia on Instagram, subscribe to Burnt Toast, and listen to the Burnt Toast PodcastWe’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:The upcoming “season” of Bama RushSydney Sweeney (and Gen-Z Stardom)Learning to craft / make things / hobby-around-the-houseTrad wives, featuring a co-host who used to be oneFor our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORESArtificial Intelligence (we’re gonna see if we can figure out an actually interesting theme here, so send us your weirdest or most mind-boggling questions)The economy, a.k.a. why is everything so damn expensive right now (my dream here is like an Odd Lots guest who doesn’t have private equity brain, please let us know if you have suggestions!)Contemporary ideas of self-careBuy Nothing groups and/or the current state of the secondhand marketAnything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segmentYou can submit them (and ideas for future eps) hereFor today’s discussion: What are your current BIG JEANS FEELINGS? What shoes are you wearing? If you’ve given jeans the middle finger, how does it feel?

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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