Ask Boyfriend!

Dear Boyfriend,Are skinny jeans a passing fad or a new fashion staple?
Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

If by "skinny jeans" you mean pants made of denim that taper down to size at the ankle thus making the entire extent of the leg tight to skin, then no, I do not see them fading entirely from our collective closets in the immediate future. Whether or not they will remain à la mode is somewhat more uncertain, but I suspect that so long as thinness is a desirable quality in appearance, articles of clothing that bestow a measure of such will retain their allure.

Your question does, however, deserve further critical inquisition on a broader scale. Fashion, as a cultural phenomenon, shares much with the concept of glacial ages, with certain inevitability in rise and fall, albeit on the much more minuscule scale of human existence vis-à-vis that of earth's geological history. Not only do trends in fashion wax and wane, the overall import of appearance in a given culture is inexorably linked to that societies' level of leisure beyond day to day subsistence, a measure of "civilization" if you will. Like the next glacial age, fashion is endangered by global warming. In the scenario of apocalypse as brought on by the myriad symptoms of global warming, fashion will initially fall away as a concern of the survivors. Not only fashion, but our cultural love of thinness shall be cast off, replaced by a need to carry a certain amount of life-giving energy about our persons in the form of a layer of fat. We shall indeed look up to those with the cunning and wherewithal to find enough food to put on weight. If these intrepid remnants of our once-proud social order manage to stave off death's chilly grasp and mutant wombats long enough to reassert some semblance of society and viable progeny, then at some point fashion will again flower in their minds. Although at that point fashion may manifest itself more in the ability to successfully rediscover the lost art of loom-building and covering of our collective naughty bits than in distinctive physical raiment, but I digress. Furthermore, nature, once free of the cancerous legions of humanity, shall heal itself eventually and one day bring about another ice age, thus tidily tying up my fashion-as-cyclical-natural-process-not-unlike-glacial-ages theory.

Thank you,
Boyfriend