Years ago, when I was a little boy, I had a severe case of what could only be called "Scalpel Knees" I could wear through the knees of a new pair of pants in about 2 1/2 weeks. And when I did, my mom did the only sensible thing she could - she would simply patch it. I hated the big blue patches on the outside of my jeans, and kept trying to convince her to sew the patches on the inside of where the hole was. This would of course be pointless. So the jeans kept getting patched. There was a kind of street cred to being fairly scruffy when you're 5, and the patches made me look far too respectable.
Now I'm "all growed up," and I have a wonderfully comfortable pair of jeans, that I have worn to just the right consistency. Except that there is a HUGE hole in them, just to the right of the fly. They are still comfortable, I still wear them around the house, but can't be seen in public with them.
Normally, I would go out and buy a new pair of jeans – recession notwithstanding, you can usually pick up a pair somewhere for $20 or so – if you have a Costco card, or aren't particularly concerned about being on the cutting edge of fashion.
But Jeff Rubin makes me want to patch them. A while ago I finished Rubin's amazing book Why Your World is About to get a Whole Lot Smaller. In it, he posits that our whole lifestyle is about to change dramatically because there simply isn't enough oil left in the ground any where that it's cost effective to drill it out. He predicts triple digit oil prices are here to stay, and says that as gas goes to $5-7 a gallon in the U.S. in the next year or so – up to 10,000,000 cars might come off the road in the coming decade.
He also says that pretty much everything we enjoy about our standard of living is based on the availability of cheap oil. Everything from the plastic that makes nearly everything we use, to the cheap jeans that have been shipped by container from Bangladesh. Which is to say that as the price of bunker fuel (the cheap, gooey oil that container ships run on) goes through the roof – it's no longer going to make sense to get our clothes from overseas, and we'll start to bring those jobs back home.
That, however, is going to require a shift in thinking by the consuming public.
Years ago I worked in a really nice Men's clothing store in Calgary, and there was a sale table at the front with dress shirts on for about $30. A gentleman came in and began to complain loudly that everything was being made in China, why couldn't he buy a shirt made in Canada. “Of course you can,” explained the owner, Graham. He took the gentleman to the back of the store where the $120 Canadian made Behar Cline shirts were. The man walked out with a $30 Chinese special.
Then Graham went on one of his usual rants about how if people aren't willing to pay the prices required to manufacture items in North America, then they need to shut up about all the jobs going offshore to China. "They're the ones chasing the jobs there by refusing to pay the higher prices!"
So all of this is to say – if the jobs do come back, and pay standard North American wages and benefits - it is soon going to be no longer feasible for most of us to go and buy new clothes every time we get a snag or a rip in our favorite pair of jeans.
In that case, I would like to start the whole “patching your jeans' trend now. Now, I have never exactly been a fashion forward kind of guy – but I”m thinking the appropriately coloured patch tastefully sewn on would fit me in quite nicely into the artistic elite down on James St. North.
That combined with the fact that when neighborhood fixtures Warren and Catherine moved out of here a year ago, they left behind a sewing machine, means I'm rarin' to give it a go.
If it works out, I'll try and post photos.
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