Why hemmed jeans look horrible
Pants epiphanies
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— Jonah & Erin
Over the years, the readers of Spy Nation have come to know me (Jonah) as an infallible friend who, despite never once knowing failure, humbly remains a constant eternal beginner.
Sometimes, though, my infallibility can outshine my eternal-beginner-style humbleness. To balance the scales and make sure people can see the full picture, I realize I need to be frank about my own shortcomings … and publish a Vulnerable Spyplane Confession.
Today is one of those times. Because I have to confess that, about a decade ago, acting out of pure ignorant foolishness, I maimed a pair of pants I loved, and rendered them permanently, irretrievably unrockable.
Yes: I took a pair of cool stonewashed Our Legacy jeans to a neighborhood dry cleaner that offered alterations, so I could get them hemmed quick & easy.
They shortened the jeans as requested, but damn it if they didn’t come back looking… wrong… uncanny… wack. I have no photos of them, because I wanted no record of my shame. In fact, for a short while, I remained in a ridiculous state of denial about what I’d done: I kept wearing them, hoping they’d magically snap out of it.
But whenever I put them on, I looked like a d-mbass. People in my community treated me with less respect, and I was less successful at every dream I attempted to achieve.
Simply put, the new hems were “straight dogs--t.” Much like these 3 unfortunate specimens:
Where did things go sideways? The tailor hadn’t done anything wrong, per se. But the hems did look dope before I brought them in, and now they did not. Rather than dwell on the matter, I chose to sweep it under the rug of my psyche, simply vowing to never get a pair of jeans hemmed again.
Since then, I’ve discovered that I was far from alone in ruining jeans this way. It turns out that when you get jeans hemmed, very different rules apply than when you hem other kinds of pants. But your typical neighborhood alterations spot is just gonna follow a standard, jeans-enwackening playbook, so the problem is rampant. There are tons of Reddit threads and other forums online where people have come to this same conclusion.
However! The most popular “fix” that people suggest for bad jeans hems is itself a weird monstrosity that will make anyone who goes that route less respected in their communities, less successful in achieving their dreams, etc.
Thankfully, the other day, a Big Homie Spyfriend who is swaggy and also an expert in denim (without ever being a hardo about it) enlightened me definitively as far as what is really going on — and how to never brick a jeans-hem again: