I sat on my couch to watch the ACM Awards show the other day, cracked a can of empty calories, and shook my head at how tight all these guys’ pants were. I thought:
“How did Aldean get inside those tight-fittin’ jeans?!”
I adjusted the waistband on my sweatpants while I sipped my beer. These guys were making me uncomfortable. I know I’m a little late to the game here on the skinny jeans in country music controversy.
Sometime last decade, people noticed the trend, women swooned, and baggy pantsed good ‘ol boys threw shade at Luke Bryan and his broteges for their tight pants. I’m not here to throw more stones. These guys are rock stars and rock stars can wear whatever the hell they want. It’s hard not to be awesome when 80,000 fans are singing your songs, even if you do pick an occasional wedgie.
Still, I’m a little surprised that when Luke Bryan moved on from his tight jeans (the dadbod comes for us all, eventually), he apparently handed them down to the next generation of aspiring sex symbol country bros.
But for Jason Aldean… the tight jeans are apparently here to stay. And me, my dadbod, and my current collection of pre-pandemic jeans couldn’t be happier.
These guys are out there crushing it in ball-crushing pants while I haven’t dared to leave my house in the vintage straight leg pair I bought in 2018. Part of the reason is that I need a shoehorn and a ratcheting mechanism to put them on. I have considered leaving the button open and tying a shoelace in a bow across the opening, like a mom-to-be waiting until the last minute to pick out maternity clothes.
But my baby is a few IPAs a day and the crushing isolation and tortilla chip binges of a two-year-old pandemic. As I grew less and less skinny, my jeans did the opposite.
But as I watched star after star strut and swing around the stage in Las Vegas in painted-on pants, I started to think that maybe that could be me too. But at Costco instead of the ACMs…
When Aldean sat behind a piano and didn’t rip his pants, the message was clear: 2022 is the year my jeans go back on. “Suck it up, suck it in, and wear those tight jeans like a man,” Aldean said to me through the screen.
These guys on stage aren’t just a bunch of millennials that didn’t get the memo about skinny jeans. They’re the inspiration to all of us dads who have been cowering in our sweatpants, prioritizing comfort over wearing normal pants again.
Who cares if you have a dadbod and your jeans don’t fit? Rock ‘em anyway: they might just make you look like a rock star.
So, if you see me at Costco and I’m having trouble reaching the paper towels on the floor, give me a hand. I’m only trying to bring some normalcy back to life one ill-fitting pair of jeans at a time.
And like the brand-new baseball mitt I bought my kid last week, these things need some breaking in.
