Shopping for girl jeans

Sometimes, we get tired of listing what's going on in our fair area, and today is one of those times (plus, there's not a lot to really suggest, besides DJ Mwanza's Lost Generation set at the Cavern, and the Chris Garver/Kristin Allen-Zito/Domenic Ferraro show at Club Dada, oh and the So Many Dynamos/Fishboy show at the Metrognome Collective in Ft. Worth).

Besides that, we're not too hot on any of the other artists playing here tonight. So, we leave you with this article. It's kind of about music, but more about fashion. It's especially aimed at you skinny guys.

Fashion trend sends young men to the other side of the store
Monday, July 10, 2006
JUSTIN ENGEL
FOR THE SAGINAW NEWS

A couple of months ago, Kris Birch decided it was time to buy himself some jeans.

Instead of heading to the men's section at Fashion Square Mall's Pac Sun, which he manages, the 20-year-old Essexville resident bought a pair of women's jeans.

And he felt no shame.

"It wasn't a big deal at all," Birch said. "You were seeing it around a lot already by then."

A fashion trend is directing young men -- early teens to early 20s -- toward the opposite side of the store, where they're buying girls' and women's pants.

Birch said he bought his pants to accommodate his bike-riding lifestyle. Women's jeans typically make for a tighter fit around the legs.

"It's not so baggy, so it

doesn't get caught in the chain," Birch said. "It makes it easier to flow. I have a lot of them now."

The fashion move started to gain momentum about six months ago, said Troy Darling, a 24-year-old store manager at Hollister in Fashion Square.

"It's a new punk rock sort of thing," said Darling, who lives in Saginaw. "We definitely see it a lot now."

Both local and national bands playing "emo-style" music -- a subgenre of hard-core punk rock -- began the fashion statement, he said, and the result trickled down to their fans and began catching on with the skateboarding crowd, too.

The fad spread so wide that Hollister manufacturers designed a new line of men's pants that fit like women's jeans. After the product sold well in larger markets across the country, they arrived for distribution at Fashion Square Mall's store two weeks ago.

Darling estimates his store sells around 10 pairs of women's pants to men per week.

Mister Poll, an online survey Web site, has measured the public's acceptance of the fashion trend. As of Friday,

45 percent of 2,131 male participants admitted they wore women's jeans, 20 percent answered, "No, but I want to"; 10 percent answered they never would; and the remaining 25 percent wouldn't sport them in public.

The Web site asked 1,102 female voters their thoughts on the chic fad.

While 16 percent didn't like the look, 58 percent answered, "They look great!" while 26 percent checked "I don't care."

When the online survey polled males with the same question, 62 percent of 2,220 voters answered "It's cool";

27 percent didn't have strong feelings one way or the other; and 11 percent didn't agree with the style.

Web users can cast their own votes at www.misterpoll.com/3315499445.html.

Aaron Hick of Breckenridge says the shopping movement is beginning to stretch beyond the punk rock culture.

"Some guys are starting to wear them for the sheer fact that they can't find their size in guy jeans," said Hick, a 22-year-old sales representative at American Eagle. "It goes hand in hand because you're seeing a lot of skinny people in (the punk scene)."

The growing popularity of the fad dissolved some of the initial awkwardness male customers experienced when purchasing female apparel.

"It was kind of weird at first," Darling said. "Now we're used to it."

Most men who buy the clothing hunt in packs, Hick said.

"You hardly see just one person coming in to buy (women's jeans)," he added. "They usually shop in groups."

For some Fashion Square clothing store employees, the new androgyny posed mathematical problems.

The fad left sales staffers such as 27-year-old Erin Hanley in an arithmetic bind: How do you convert a man's size 36 waistline into the single-digit measurement system that women use?

"After a while, I got experienced, though," said Saginaw resident Hanley, an assistant manager at Hot Topics. "More and more guys started doing it, so I got used to it."

Hanley, for one, is a fan of the fashion.

"A lot of the time, guys look better in them than girls do," she said.