RIPPED JEANS SELL NOSTALGIA

Everyone remembers the fad, back in the day, of selling jeans pre-ripped, with holes and wrinkles and fake-looking fades in the front. I never really understand where that fad came from. Part of me believed (and still does, to a point) that the fad was just another creation of the fashion industry required to consistently create new products in order to maintain profit margins, to cause people to believe that they need to buy what's "new" so that they can throw out what's "old" (which is probably only a year old). This is called perceived obsolescence. However, I think there might be another layer to what was going on with that fad.

Whenever you buy a new anything, the object is merely that to you: an object. It has no value to you beyond what you paid for it. When you buy a computer, it's just a computer. It has no files, no programs, no background, nothing to show anyone that this belongs to a particular person. As you use an object, you imprint yourself on it, and the object becomes "yours." You imprint your particular trademark. Your clothes fit your better, they go through things with you, and you now have an emotional attachment to that particular object. There may be a stain from a particularly lovely evening. You might save poems or songs on your computer.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the appeal of pre-ripped jeans. Unfortunately for the companies, the rips themselves never offer any particular emotional attachment. You don't remember a particular experience associated with ripping the jeans. However, getting them pre-ripped gives you the feeling (I guess) that these are old, these are "yours." Instead of having to actually go through the experience that causes the jeans to rip, you are merely given them with the experience already tied to it, the idea being that the company can now sell emotional attachment right off the bat.

They're selling nostalgia. They're selling the object "pre-mine", not as in "before mine", but as in "already mine", like "pre-shrunk." I don't know if this has any merit. I think, personally, that buying pre-ripped jeans is a circumvention of having to actually have the experience and spend the time wearing them to get them to look that way. In a society where 99% percent of the shit that's sold is thrown out in 6 months, there's an incredible desire to get things NOW, instead of waiting for them to happen. People don't want to have to break in a pair of jeans; they want the jeans to fit them, to have the nostalgia associated with them right now.

It's unfortunate that they got away with this. The fad has since passed (I presume; I haven't seen much of them in a while), but the concept of selling things for now hasn't. People still want things and experiences without having to work for them, and as long as that desire exists, companies will cater to it. So for now, the ripped-jean fad has passed, but the concept that supported it hasn't, and iterations of the same concept will continue until we get out of our short-term mindset.