THE EVOLUTION OF JEANS

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There is a down side to jeans. All that holding and comforting can, like an over-attentive spouse, get in your way. The very cling that you can lean against takes effort to overcome. Jeans are not the best climbing gear. Straining your knee up to and past your belt, sometimes necessary in scaling a peak like the Devil's Needle, wears on you after a few hours of moving vertically. In addition, jeans can be hot, so they may not be the prime choice for heavy work in the sun.

We go back to our heritage. Who works hard in the sun? The fanner. What does he wear? Bib overalls.

Americans find it easy to adopt cowboy jeans as their own but it takes a big man to wear bib overalls. I happen to be wearing a pair now. There is much to recommend in these Oshkosh B'gosh bib-front blues. The bib is probably a vestige of protection for walking through fields of corn leaves, or a response to the railroader's need to lean against and over greasy machinery. Unlike jeans' gun-belt tightness around the center of gravity, bibs and their suspenders have a looser, more general embrace. Like the Bedouin burnoose, it promotes circulation. Bibs are designed around a walking, stooping, reaching man, rather than around a riding man.

When wearing jeans, you can carry some folding money ("Keep the change, I'm wearing jeans."), a bandanna, a stockman's knife that wears through the pocket in about 10 minutes, a pocket watch that can withstand several atmospheres of compression, and a note from the foreman. A wallet in the hip pocket looks like a misplaced pacemaker and galls the buttocks. Now, in these bib overalls, I've got room for a socket set and a desk encyclopedia. I've got pockets down there for folding carpenter's rules, loops here for hammers, buttonholes up here for my railroad watch fob (engineers and brakemen always wore bib overalls), pockets toward the rear for bandanna and notebook. These things feel good, too.

The only down side is that I catch myself in a passing mirror a few times a day and do a classic double take. At first glance, I look like a cartoon. At second glance, I look like a refugee farmer. But careful examination reveals a confident man concerned with his own comfort and cargo capacity, a man who is no slave to fashion. It takes a big man to wear bib overalls.

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