Sir, - I was surprised and amused recently to hear that a day has been nominated as "denim day", when people are urged to wear some article of that material. Surely, since the fateful day of the fig-leaf, there can never have been a more outworn cliche in the history of man than denim. I'd have thought that a no-denim day would have more point.
I think I had only just escaped from my teens when those who were entering them got the notion that tight blue denim jeans constituted a statement of some significance. It is a notion that they never grew out of and indeed they were soon rushing to beget clones of themselves. My own children were wearing denim before ever they reached their teens. Now that I think of it, did I see my eight-onth-old granddaughter in denim the other day? Even people who had left their teens when I was her age have caught the denim craze.
It now seems to be taken for granted almost universally that for any occasion not demanding the utmost formality of dress denim is the fabric of choice. From jeans it has spread to shirts, skirts, dresses, shorts, jackets of every kind - even caps and bags. It is worn by every age and all genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. It is the ultimate in unisexism. Bluecollar workers have been replaced by blue-jeans workers. For the idle it is practically a uniform.
Can the grass be mown, a cake baked, the roses pruned, the ceiling painted, the ornaments dusted, the car washed, the cows milked, a nappy changed or a JCB operated without girding one's loins in denim? Could one go for a walk, play with the children, enjoy a barbeque, visit the in-laws or laze in the garden unless attired in this ultra-conventional manner?
Here's one who says: "Yes!" You'll find no denim in my wardrobe or strewn on my bed. I know that colours other than blue are now being permitted to fade. I accept that things have loosened up considerably. My prejudice, however - for such, I admit, it has become - derives from the day when denim implied tightness of a degree that I did not need to experience to know that it could not be borne.
It ought to be well known that the male crotch area was intended to be afforded a certain minimum of ventilation and freedom from constriction. I believe it to be a lamentable dereliction by the medical establishment to have been so silent in this respect. Who is to say that the rise in testicular carcinoma, the collapse in sperm counts and many other evils are not to be attributed to denim?
Another wholly unacceptable feature is the style of the pockets. I happen to believe that trouser pockets are such an indispensable convenience that even if Adam had stood between his wife and the serpent, he or his descendants would utimately have invented them, and trousers to put them in. It is in those pockets that I keep my handkerchief, my keys and my coins. I want none of these items to be parted from my person, and to them I insist on the same fast, fumble-free access that the cowboy had to his six-gun. This means that they must be set into the outer seam of the trousers. But in denim jeans they are tucked into the fold of one's groin, defying the deftest of pickpockets.
It's an anything-but-denim day that I'll be watching out for. - Yours, etc.,
From Frank Farrell
Lakelands Close, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.