FashBlog.com

By Christina VanGinkel

I think I have seen it all now, at least where fashion is concerned. A pair of jeans that comes with built in controls for your iPod! When I came across the picture of a pair on my favorite online news, I at first thought how interesting, but the more I gave it some thought, I realized that it was just a bit too overboard for me. The jeans supposedly come with built in controls in the pocket, and a cord that attaches to the iPod itself, to keep from losing it maybe. The more I read about them though, the more I wondered if it was just an advertising gimmick, but it does not appear to be. Levi Straus seems to be the maker of the jeans, and with such a well-known name behind them, someone might actually buy them. I for one will not be on the list of shoppers searching for a pair. I am not a fashion aficionado by any stretch of the imagination, but for the first time in a long time, I can tell you that I was not impressed by the looks of them when I saw the pictures of the RedWire DLX iPod Jeans that are floating around the web.

Sure, I have seen iPod friendly clothing before. I actually bought my youngest son a jacket for snowboarding last year that came with an interior pocket for such a device, with a guide area for headphone cord to run, so that he could comfortably listen to music from his MP3 player and snowboard at the same time. The design was well thought out, keeping the cords in order so they did not become tangled when he took his jacket off in the lodge. Nothing was built in though, and tossing the jacket in the wash was not an issue, as I simply made sure that he had not left his MP3 player tucked into the pocket on the inside of the jacket.

Clothing fashions come and go each year, and some are fun, making people wonder why no one ever thought to do such a design before. Others are imaginative, taking into thought the way we live our lives today, such as the jacket I bought for my son. Others seem just a bit too strange, making a lot of people wonder just what the designers were thinking of when they not only sketched up such a design, but also then actually got others at their company to think it was a good idea, and to follow through and make and then market these designs. These RedWire DLX iPod Jeans fall into this last category as far as I am concerned.

I suppose, if you loved your iPod, and wanted to be on the cutting edge of something, not fashion, as I know it, but something, and you had several hundred dollars to spend, you might be tempted to buy a pair. The more I think about it, there might be some people out there who are fashion savvy enough to carry off such a look as these jeans will give, but I can in all belief tell you that I do not think these will ever be mainstream. Maybe the designers at Levi know something we do not. Maybe they have some ulterior marketing scheme in mind that has nothing to do with a dark pair of iPod power, red tether jeans. Maybe they are just throwing these out there to be dissected by the news agencies and the world of bloggers at large. By doing so, maybe they hope to get back enough feedback on what would be a feasible fashion trend that combines the popular iPod with your jeans.

Big and small companies alike occasionally make snafus when it comes to some marketing scheme they had in mind. With the RedWire DLX iPod Jeans front and center right now, maybe we will soon know what they had in mind, or maybe they will just go down in the world of fashion history as those funny looking jeans with the red leash attached that you used to tie your iPod too. They are the fashion conscious of the world after all, while I am just a middle aged mother trying to figure out what to send her son to school in this fall. (I can guarantee you it will not be a pair of $200 plus jeans with a red tether attached to them!)