Trousers
I’ve had a bizarre week. Split up with my long-term girlfriend on Sunday, which has largely defined the week’s oddness, done frankly excessive quantities of physics, and got a blurry photograph of the French President Jacques Chirac today. Oxford does seem to attract famous people like flies to a corpse…
The thing which has annoyed me most all week, though, is definitely my attempts to purchase a new pair of trousers. This came on Sunday, slightly before the break-up of my two-year relationship, and involved me walking around Cambridge with Liz, seeking a pair of trousers which actually didn’t have holes in them.
I was shopping in a pair of knackered jeans, hole-ridden and useless and yet, all the shops seemed to want to seel me were knackered, hole-ridden, useless jeans. Quite why there is this sudden vogue for pre-knackered clothing I can’t quite fathom. If any other industry tried it, selling pre-mouldy food or pre-rusted cars, us consumers would throw a wobbly. And yet, if you go into a high street clothes store, around half of the garments on sale appear to be frayed, worn into stripes or just plain buggered.
When I finally found a shop which would sell me a nice pair of corduroy trousers, my choice of colours was restricted by a bizarre phenomenon; the button fly. For some reason, half of the otherwise-identical trousers had this ridiculous feature, and grouped by varying colours.
Girls tell me that button flies are not inconvenient, as apparently once the top button is undone, a well-made fly will pop open with gentle tension. For men, whose main use for a fly involves leaving the top button done up, this is ridiculous. It takes three hours’ fumbling stood at a urinal to undo these things, by which time you’ve weed yourself. And it’s not as if they are any more ‘fashionable’, because unless you undo your trousers in the street, it’s impossible to tell from a visual inspection.
However, the zip-flied pair in which I am now comfortably sat, are at least a step up from my previous, velcro-flied cords. There’s nothing like the characteristic ripping noise of undoing velcro to get you some funny looks in the gents’…
June 18th, 2005 at 16:00
Interesting… I had a 30min conversation in the pub last night about button flies hence me now looking up Mr Google and finding your post.
I’m a true believer in undoing the top button on the jeans when I’ve got a button fly. I was shocked to find out that some people DIDN’T do this. The people who didn’t do this were shocked to find out that some people did undo it!
It’s a crazy world…