Fashion in The Virgin Queen
Years ago, I lived in Virginia, a state named after England’s Elizabeth 1. We had a townhouse with a pond behind it. There were some woods on the other side and one night a young man decided he would run into the woods to escape the police.
There was but a single flaw in this plan: Saggy pants. The villainous trousers fell around his knees and he was apprehended. Let us be clear; He wasn’t arrested because of some crime; he was arrested because he wore saggy pants. He failed to escape and his fashion choices landed him in jail.
I suppose we have all flirted with being banished from civilized society because of our fashion choices. You should know that I am old… I mean really old: Dirt calls me Sir.
I have even been to a Bee Gees concert. We held up cigarette lighters because real phones hadn’t been invented yet. This was the late seventies and I owned a print, double knit shirt. I also had a too fat gold neckless. Why? Because it looked good with my bell bottom pants. God, do I have to explain everything?
I never did any hard time but maybe I should have. What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, saggy pants.
There are a couple of small towns in my country that have passed laws against them. No really, I swear; several. There have even been saggy pants deaths! This is clearly a menace to the very fabric
of… I started to say society; then thought butts, … It’s hard for me to get this image of this black man’s butt out of my mind. Its brown with a crack right down the middle and it’s destroying the very fabric of… this is stupid. What were we talking about again?
‘Pull ‘Em Up, Bro!’
Not my style, 100 per cent.
This is probably the only thing I would have to say about saggy pants.
Yes, I love Tupac but you may love his personality and his songs but still you ain’t gonna love this wear. Yes, I understand this is a sub-cultural thing. By the way, I like loose cargo trousers with its big side pockets, they look… ‘dynamic’ to me, even sporty but this thing’s design is galaxies away from those dammed saggy pants with your underwear exposed Urbi et Orbi.
Well, if you’re a male and your ass is wider than your shoulders, you’ve got short legs, too, then you might like it. Just to hide your problems and to suddenly look cool. Instead you should consume less fast food and spend most of your time exercising both indoor and outdoor. Thanks to Beelzebub, I’m not like that and hopefully will never be. Would do my best, at least.
What I didn’t know and just recently discovered doing research before writing this blog, is that saggy pants might be banned from wearing in public. In fact, since the 2000s there’ve been numerous attempts (still ongoing) in the United States on a city level to ban it, declaring it 
disorderly conduct. Still, it never went up to state or federal levels because it had been ruled out by courts as unconstitutional. The interesting fact is that in America over the course of several years some people, mostly football players, have been removed from planes for wearing saggy pants with, I suspect, their underwear exposed to passengers.
Being a presidential nominee in 2008, Barack Obama has spoken against it, saying that ‘some people might not want to see your underwear. I’m one of them’.
Sagging has been ridiculed in music videos and I fully support this message. This is one of the biggest fashion failures of all time. I’d even use the ‘epic fail’ expression.
But in the end, if you want to go uncool, no problem. Get your pair of this saggy crap and go explore the world with a smile on your face. 
Just do not be surprised if people would point fingers t you or waiters won’t let you into a bar to have a drink. Don’t make yourself a clown even if you’ve got every right to.
They’ll get over it……..
I suppose it’s everybody’s right to dress however they feel they should; the question is what it means for those of us who have to put up with seeing this monstrous, abject apology for fashion; do we just feel merely uncomfortable when experiencing someone wearing, or partly wearing, saggy pants, or does our disgust constitute something akin to being traumatised by illegal abuse?
It’s nothing new to suggest that most grown-ups think that young people’s fashion is distasteful, and I suppose that’s the whole point. I cannot believe that anyone would dress as a Goth, or with holes in their jeans, or with their pants halfway down their legs, for their own personal comfort and feel-good factor. They must just do it to piss their elders off, particularly their parents, or maybe because they think it makes them stand out. It certainly does. It makes them stand out us complete arseholes.
I have little doubt that when today’s antagonists look back at how they looked in saggy pants, they will be cringing with embarrassment. I still cringe when I look at my wedding photos; flared trousers and boots with incredibly high heels. And that was conventional dress for the day in the early 70s! But guess what, I got over it, and so will the now-a-bit-more-mature wearers of saggy pants. Thank goodness!
Saggy pants are a symbol of something else – whether it’s prison clothing in America, or whatever the origins, there is no place for this in modern society. And, more importantly, there never was. I know that in Dean-land, wearing these kind of abominations became illegal in some States. While that may be considered a trifle draconian by British standards, I am sure I’m not alone in saying that a complete ban on this travesty of taste should have been put in place at the outset. 
I feel better after writing that. And come to think of it, I rather liked flares……..but this is the point. I would not go around wearing them in my sixties just to piss of my kids and their kids. Or would I…….?