Why Ban can't find pants

A friend and I went clothes hunting.

What we found out was preposterous. If you care about the state of our, as Levi's puts it, frontier independence, democratic idealism, social change or usable pants, you should probably note that after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, we have lost the ability to make jeans.

Don't get me wrong- we found plenty of jeans. Ban, the friend I mentioned, examined a barrage of jeans: lower-abdominal-exposing denims, hippopotamus-sized denims, multiple-tatter denims, knee-long denims, lower-hip-exposing denims, orca-sized denims, patched denims, lower-buttocks-exposing denims, the works.

The problem is, not one of the jeans can be worn by individuals with self-respect above those of Dung Beetles. It's amazing no one's rallying in front of jeans manufacturers going all “Yo, nincompoops, bring back usable pants.” And this is Manila- we'd rally if the Eddie Gils can't run for president.

But the point is, we are experiencing these jeans troubles because of the same crooks who brought us the B-E-A-M means smile tune, the 30 year-old and running Family Rubbing alchohol commercial, Sandara Park Billboards, and particularly awesome, the green tea health craze, with testimonies of the healthy effectiveness of green tea on their boxes: skinny, bikini-clad women in mentally-retarded poses.

The culprits are, yet again, marketers.

To understand our denim blues, we need to trace back its history. Jeans were borne out of an extreme need; four scores and 35 years ago, our founding father, Levi Strauss, decided to make tough pants using cotton reinforced by steel rivets. To this day, no one knows what rivets are, so dictionaries give it weird descriptions like "mechanical fasteners consisting of a smooth cylindrical shaft with heads on either end."

But the point is, these responded to a pressing need: tougher clothes.

Fast forward to over a hundred years later, 1989, when grunge and hiphop hit all-time highs. Fashion statements abound, jeans designers were looking for the next big thing.

So in a New York conference that would later determine the future of jeans, everybody scratched their heads. It wasn't long before someone, who believe it or not was getting paid, asked, "How 'bout we make them bigger?"

Like fly swarms that darken southern skies, cargo jeans cast shadows all over the world, each one as big as Cuba. Jeans producers kept outdoing each other, and the race was on; the finish line, pants as big as king-sized blankets, except less stylish.

But the need was clear: utilitarian clothing, loosely defined as jeans that allow you to carry file cabinets.

The New Yorkers were not finished. Their specialists left their coat at home, walked to the conferences at 50 below zero, and while suffering from hypothermia, came up with the suggestion, "Let's make them look old."

They came out with guns blazing. They made brand new jeans, Ottoman-Turks style. No efforts were spared- they were faded, torn, stitched, burnt, patched, abducted by aliens, you name it.

The need was still clear: help mother nature speed things up. Who has two years to wait for pants to fade color in the fast-paced world anyway, they asked.

But they still weren't finished. In yet another conference room, the most atrocious suggestion in the history of clothing had been uttered. "Let's show some rear."

Which brings us to lower-buttocks exposing jeans, the latest in state-of-the-art anal exposition. It's a fever. Every store has 'em. Apparently, guys have collectively made it clear that they need jeans not to cover their behinds with any efficiency.

This has to stop. Conference-room dementia has taken away our right to jeans that can’t be worn by Pandas, don’t look like something you would clean a table with, or do not reveal our collective bonbons. If it takes away any more, we’d be looking at our nads. Not our own, mind you.