#jncos

It's not that I don't like the way this looks, or think it couldn't be fashionable. (I don't care!) Rather, I have a strong visceral reaction to this look because you had to be really, really careful about making sure you didn't look like this when we were kids. I was a Jncos/Kikwear devotee in junior high and high school; I had one pair of Kiks that hit right at the ground when I had my Airwalks on -- you could see just the barest edge of the midsole when I was standing up straight, and my socks when I was sitting down. Which is to say: they were too short by many orders of emo/skater/xXxedgexXx magnitude. The kids I hung out with roasted me mercilessly for wearing that one pair of pants, one time.

Please allow 18-year-old Andrea Grimes, Mansfield High School Class of '02, to demonstrate thw shortest possible acceptable big pants length. These were my least big pants, the only big pants my mother would consent to me wearing in my senior photos.

You will note that you can tell I have feet here -- you can even tell what color my (extremely fucking cool) shelltoes were. This is not ideal, but it wouldn't get you bullied. You can tell by the wear on the heels of these pants that I typically wore them very low on my hips, to make them appear even bigger and baggier.

I suspect the origins of this kind of niche, pant-related bullying were class-related, at least at my massive Texas high school. If you couldn't afford to get your pants big -- if you had to wear hand-me-downs in the wrong size, or had to wear the same pair for so long you grew out of them -- you ended up with the highwater Jncos, and you would absolutely be punished for it. It sucked. It was awful. And none of us are going to try to relive that, no matter how stylish the young folks look.