FashBlog.com

by Christina VanGinkel

The sale flyers keep coming, so I am now positive that fall and school shopping have arrived! The newest one to land in my mailbox was a flyer for a local discount store. Paging through it last night I came to one solid conclusion, as its contents echoed much the same as all the other flyers and catalogs that have recently arrived. Not only are jeans still very much in style for school wear, but straight-legged jeans have not made a comeback. Thank you! Whether referred to as a wide boot cut or a small bell-bottom, they all mean relatively the same thing. The bottom of the jean is cut wide enough that the wearers shoe does not stick out like a clown shoe.

Why this is important to me, I really have no idea. First of all, I am not in school, heck, I am a grandmother. Secondly, my foot is not even very big as far as shoe sizes go, with mine being a somewhat average size 7 1/2. As I live in jeans most of the time though, I am comforted by the fact that if teenage girls are wearing jeans with a wider bottom, I can be assured that this same style will also be available in my size. I do not wear the low hip hugging style that is so popular, but I do purchase my jeans from the same racks that the teens do. I go for the more conservative cut style whose waist is where they have been on regular jeans for as long as I can remember.

My penchant for checking current styles this way started many years ago, when I was still in school myself. I can remember going school clothes shopping with my mother and being appalled that the only jeans I could find were cut so straight that the only way for me to slide my feet into them was by pretending to be a ballet student doing a dance on my toes. Once my feet were through, I would then have to peel them off me inside out at the end of the day.

When a wider cut jean came back on the market just a few years later, I swore I would never be caught without several backup pairs of wide legged jeans in my closet again. Be assured, I am not talking wide bell-bottoms, just those whose bottom slightly resembles a bell-bottom, a flare cut I believe is the proper term applied to them. So, just in case some dreaded brain disease overtook the designers of jeans, and the only patterns the manufacturers could find were the old ones for those horrible straight-legged concoctions, I always buy an extra pair or two more than I really think my closet needs. At least I would be able to get dressed in the morning without standing on my toes! In addition, to those of you who love the straight legged look, I admit I admire you a bit, as you must all be in great shape to stand on toe every day to get dressed!