Wear and tear: In fashion, it’s not about rags to riches but about riches to rags 
They looked half-starved and were
wearing torn and tattered rags. I thought they must have gatecrashed the
get-together i was at to see if they could cadge a handout to buy
themselves something to eat or at least get darning work done on their
raggedy clothes, which were not just threadbare but in places were all
bare and no thread.
I was about to discreetly slip them a few bucks by way of charity when my host went up to the two newcomers and greeted them warmly. I realised that the scruffy twosome weren’t gatecrashing alms-seekers but guests, and guests of honour at that. They were well-known fashionistas and what they were wearing weren’t rags but the latest rage in the world of style: stressed jeans, also known as ripped denim.
In times gone by, poor people – the politically correct term for whom is now economically weaker sections, or EWS to pals – aspired to go from rags to riches. Now it seems that upward mobility has been turned on its head and those who are fortunate enough to have riches aspire to dress in rags, the politically correct term for which is stressed, or ripped denim.
Why well-to-do people – and you have to be well-to-do to be able afford to buy stressed or ripped jeans – should go about in clothes no raddiwala would deign to take away for fear of inviting the ridicule of his professional colleagues is a mystery to me, like the Bermuda Triangle, or the secret formula for Coke. But the fact is that jeans strategically torn at hip and thigh and other designated areas of the anatomy are the latest in thing. Or should that be the latest out thing, in that parts of you keep popping out of all those holes in your clothes?
And you can’t go get an ordinary, unripped pair of jeans and do the ripping yourself, no more than you’d self-perform brain surgery. You have to get a haute couture designer like Rohit Bal or JJ Vallaya to do the ripping for you before he puts a multi-digit price tag on the mutilated garment.
Which is why ripped denim is called ripped denim. Because in more ways than one it’s a real rip-off.
I was about to discreetly slip them a few bucks by way of charity when my host went up to the two newcomers and greeted them warmly. I realised that the scruffy twosome weren’t gatecrashing alms-seekers but guests, and guests of honour at that. They were well-known fashionistas and what they were wearing weren’t rags but the latest rage in the world of style: stressed jeans, also known as ripped denim.
In times gone by, poor people – the politically correct term for whom is now economically weaker sections, or EWS to pals – aspired to go from rags to riches. Now it seems that upward mobility has been turned on its head and those who are fortunate enough to have riches aspire to dress in rags, the politically correct term for which is stressed, or ripped denim.
Why well-to-do people – and you have to be well-to-do to be able afford to buy stressed or ripped jeans – should go about in clothes no raddiwala would deign to take away for fear of inviting the ridicule of his professional colleagues is a mystery to me, like the Bermuda Triangle, or the secret formula for Coke. But the fact is that jeans strategically torn at hip and thigh and other designated areas of the anatomy are the latest in thing. Or should that be the latest out thing, in that parts of you keep popping out of all those holes in your clothes?
And you can’t go get an ordinary, unripped pair of jeans and do the ripping yourself, no more than you’d self-perform brain surgery. You have to get a haute couture designer like Rohit Bal or JJ Vallaya to do the ripping for you before he puts a multi-digit price tag on the mutilated garment.
Which is why ripped denim is called ripped denim. Because in more ways than one it’s a real rip-off.
