What the Fuck Are These Jeans

Have you ever seen a pair of distressed jeans and thought, “Why would people pay money for jeans that have already been partially destroyed?” Or perhaps you thought, “It seems strange and disingenuous to wear something that suggests you have participated in some kind of rigorous activity that would yield such results, when you clearly did no such thing.” Well, boy, does Nordstrom have a new pair of jeans for you!

Introducing the Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans from denim purveyor Prps. (Or maybe it’s PRPS? Anyway, it is those letters, deliberately arranged in that order.) These jeans aren’t just distressed, they’re smeared with “mud” to give you that real blue collar look with none of the labor! And they only cost $425!!

It’s for the man who wants that working class vibe that everyone seems to be into these days. For the man who wants to work off some calories after chowing down on $66 collard greens from Neiman Marcus. For the man who wants people to look at him and ask, “Rust Cohle or Rust Belt?” For the man who can’t lay eyes on tractor tire without fucking going on about CrossFit.

Here’s the official description of the pants from Nordstrom:

Heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.

Technically, it does show that you’re very afraid to get down and dirty because you’d rather spend over $400 on fake mud, but who said words had to mean things? Also, I’m pretty sure “Americana” has been dead since John Cougar Mellancamp took “Cougar” out of his name (though Lana Del Rey did successfully reanimate the genre for a brief moment before the zombie corpse of Kid Rock and the #MAGA brigade finally blew its fucking brains out for good). But what do I know? I’m just a middle class writer, brain riddled by the evils of identity politics and PC-culture, who wears privileged jeans that are only caked in hummus and cat fur and not mud.