The Minnesota Farm Woman

I know you are somewhat surprised to be hearing fashion statements from me, but I read recently that all the fashionistas are wearing denim this year. They’re mixing and matching their denims, too, with jeans and a chambray shirt, topped off with a denim jacket. The fashion industry has already reinvented miniskirts, wide leg pants and low-rise blue jeans. Notice that I said “reinvented”. For those of us who were teenagers in the 70’s, these styles are nothing new, and although denim was worn long before that, we were the first to make it fashionable. My closet was filled with wide-legged hip huggers and denim jeans of all shapes and sizes. My wide-legged pants were long enough to drag in the dirt until the hems were ragged, something that my mother never could understand. If the legs weren’t wide, the jeans had to be skin-tight. So tight, in fact, that we would lie down on the bed to squeeze into them, sometimes even spraying them down and putting them in the dryer to make them even tighter. I usually wore them with my favorite Earth Shoes, which had a wide toe and negative heel and were really quite comfortable. My pride and joy was my denim jacket, known in those days as a jeans jacket. It was a plain old jacket with plenty of pockets and metal buttons which any farmer would have purchased, but I embellished it in my own style with hand-embroidered flowers and an eclectic group of sewn-on patches, including the American flag, a peace sign, and one that read “Don’t eat yellow snow.” Before sewing on the patches, I washed it about fifty times in the washing machine, adding a touch of bleach each time until it was faded just right. Later, I punched holes along the hem and added metal eyelets of different colors. Yes, I was cool. These days, although I still wear comfortable wide-toed shoes due to bunions and arthritis, my own personal fashion statement has changed. I still wear jeans fairly often, but probably even worse than the “mom jeans” that everyone laughs about, I wear “grandma jeans”, which have a touch of spandex added to the denim and are more forgiving in the waistline and hips. Even better are my yoga pants, which I have in several colors. I have to be careful when I buy either that they are not the low-rise type of pants, because I no longer want people to see my navel. My beloved jeans jacket is saved in my trunk of memories for future generations to laugh at or bring to Antiques Roadshow, where it would probably be considered iconic 1970’s fashion. Oh, and one more thing: If my jeans are ever tight enough that I have to lie down on the bed to zip them up, I am certainly not going to tell anyone!