Once Upon the early 90s there was such a thing as acid-washed jeans, jeans that appeared whitish or lightish after some type of chem bath that rendered them the other side of worn out - in their last throes of material integrity.
Acid-wash meant fragile, a day in a photo studio whilst lifting and arranging props could mean busted-out knees.
Yours Truly knew about above from experience for there was a bitchin' pair of acid wash jeans back in The Day, the sole pair in The Wardrobe that remained intact for a couple of months only.
It was 1991 and Artvoice was underway - about a year old.
Yours Truly was helping develop the fledgling tab by being a photo columnist (What Has Happened), helping tidy up distribution, helping tidy up the chaos that was the office, helping tidy up what was slowly evolving into a staff (acting as an informal H.R. lady), and doing some design of ads and pages.
Steve Bartoo, an artist who long ago fled the Middling City for the Shiney Apple, drew an excellent series of still photo cells up one leg of the very holey acid wash jeans one day as he visited the Artvoice office of yore.
They are still on a shelf in The Walk-In Closet, suitable for framing.
Zoom ahead to the present day.
In lieu of acid washing manufacturers of all things dungaree now sporadically toss some flexible fibers into the jean mix.
They give, they bend, they rock.
So Yours Truly gleaned a super pair of jeans with a fraction of its fiber content being stretchy.
YT wore said jeans out on Friday night - to dinner, to an art op (Jerry Mead's excellent installation at Anderson Gallery), to a show at Babeville's (not to be confused with Nanceville) Ninth Ward (Mark Olsen formerly of The Jayhawks and now of a trio including a woman from Norway and YT asked - the cheese from there is a sort of Jarlsberg), and to Stillwater for some Veuve with the girls.
It was whilst picking up my camera bag that there was a separation of fabric from rear pocket.
All along the pocket line the fabric was skeletal.
Later, holding the jeans up to a light source, one could see that every juncture of fabric (where leg met pockets, where sections of waist melt belt loop) the dang-blamed thangs were about to explode away into oblivion.
YT does not harbour a fear of give-way jeans now, in sooth YT feels that this weakness is another precious quirk of Fashion.
Like elegant evening slippers, like a silk blouse from a fine shoppe in Tokyo, jeans remain sometime sartorial wimpware.
Caveat emptor.
Caveat stretchtor.

Fashionable Love.