Dirt-Washed Jeans: Fall Share #7 – 12/4/24

Dirt-Washed Jeans

Fashion fads crack me up. I now love to wear what we used to call Mom jeans when I was a teenager. My teen now wears the same style of corduroy pants I wore in high school. Meanwhile, my middle daughter really wants to find a pair of jeans that don’t already have pre-made holes in them.

There’s a new fashion fad this farmer finds particularly entertaining. Apparently at Mt. Horeb High School at least, some kids happily go by the moniker ‘farm kid.’ (Not mine, in case you were wondering. That would be too easy). Large belt buckles. Cowboy boots. Denim. Flannel. These are the hallmarks that all genders identifying as ‘farm kids’ are wearing these days. Some of the kids that dress as farm kids don’t actually live on farms. They live in town or in the suburban Veridian neighborhoods surrounding Mt. Horeb. This does not stop them from wanting to participate in the ‘farm kid’ style and culture.

One way they do this?  They wipe dirt on their blue jeans. They want their pants to look like they harvest something from the ground or fed an animal before school.

I can’t tell you how much I love this ironic fashion twist. Dirt has a way of grinding itself into farm clothes and never fully coming out. I have a personal rule that I never wear fun clothes on the farm, ever. Not even for a few minutes! Why?  Because inevitably, I get side-tracked and do ‘just one little chore’, and then the dirt is there. Here I am always trying to get dirt out of my clothes, my rugs, my nails – and meanwhile there are kids purposefully dirt-washing their jeans!

If those kids just wanted to come work at our farm for an hour or so, we’d get their perfect denim looking legit in no time. But that would just make too much sense, wouldn’t it?