Saggy Pants and Low Cut Blouses (Part One)

by Hero Jenkins

Cops were thrilled when the saggy pants style hit - though they won’t admit it. The reason being that some (and I want to stress SOME, not ALL) of those individuals choosing to make this fashion statement engaged in criminal activity. And since most of these people were considerably younger and faster than the aforementioned cops, their saggy pants leveled the playing field considerably. It's pretty hard to run at top speed while constantly pulling your pants up.

I didn’t get it. To me the saggy pants just looked stupid, like they'd pooped their drawers or something. Why someone would pull their pants down and expose their underpants to the world escaped me. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how they stayed up at all. I asked my sons but they refused to tell me. I guess I was too old. Like... if you 'haftaask' you don’t need to know.

Now, I was not so old that I didn’t remember my teenage years. I wasn’t old enough to participate in the sixties, but the seventies… that was my era. Basketball players wore tighty-whitey style shorts and everyone had at least one pair of platform shoes. We wore medallions and headbands and danced on our skates. Our parents thought we were nuts. Our kids crack themselves up looking at photos of my wife and I when we were dating. We both had huge afros and wore hideous paisley shirts and bell-bottom pants. I had a couple of chest hairs and if you look closely at the photos you can see them because we didn’t really button our shirts in those days.

I understand that each generation has its style, but this saggy pants thing was different. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the style was designed to mimic prisoner attire, since baggy (as opposed to tight) fitting clothing is preferable in prison for obvious reasons. Then the hip-hop culture kicked in and adopted it... which lead to gangsta rap and everything that came after that. Times have changed and this kind of dress does not have the same stigma attached but at the time the style had “trouble” written all over it. My wife and I never liked the style - and we didn’t like the way law enforcement was reacting to kids who adopted the style. So when my SONS adopted it we decided to nip it in the bud.

At first, when they started strutting around the house with their “chones” (underpants) exposed I tried to reason with them. When that didn’t work I started strutting around the house with MY pants below my butt. It really grossed them out… I’m not sure why... but it did the trick. Alas, regulating their behavior at home was not enough. Sooner or later they would go out into the real world and it was a simple matter (once out of parental sight) to loosen their belts and drop their pants.

I soon grew weary of telling them to pull their pants up so I stopped. What I did next completely shocked them. I simply cut them up and threw them in the garbage.

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