Memories are precious, but cubic footage is expensive. For various reasons, possessions outlive their usefulness, and need to be released, with explanation.
Did I get what I expected from you? More or less. More and less, really. You were a sort of perfect capsule of the J. Crew experience. J. Crew is profoundly ersatz, ersatz on multiple levels. When J. Crew and I were both much younger than we are now, I refused to own its products for ideological reasons. Now I am older and have given up on fighting certain battles.
You, the five-pocket chinos, were in fact a response to some of the problems that come with getting older. One eventually reaches an age where one feels foolish going to work in a t-shirt and jeans every day, even when there is no professional or cultural expectation of being dressed in a higher register than that. One is not a kid anymore.
But wearing khakis, qua khakis, feels more like an adolescent substitution for dress pants, not a grown-up substitution for jeans. So here you were: tan chino fabric, cut in a five-pocket jeans pattern. A sort of metaphor for post-adult middle age.
Too much of a metaphor, maybe. Despite your ostensibly straightforward marriage of one standard pants pattern and another standard pants fabric, you were cut with a trendy (or at least trendlike) rise, or absence of rise. You rode low in the back. Sometimes plumber-low. Paired with certain short-hemmed shirts—well, I apologize to people whose line of sight might have passed behind my office chair on the days I miscalculated.
Still, did I mention that middle age involves defeat? I wore you a lot, and I would have kept wearing you, warily, indefinitely. Your silliness was outweighed by your usefulness.
Yet because you are a J. Crew product, you also were pre-worn or softened or whatever the terminology was for artificial fabric fatigue, unearned experience. The knees grew thinner and thinner. A little weak spot appeared. You were still presentable enough to wear to church with the in-laws on Christmas morning (it was the Midwest). But shortly after coming back from the service, as I crawled around on the wall-to-wall carpet with my small children and their new toys, the torque and friction were too much. The fabric exploded, almost from seam to seam. You were unwearable.
And, it turned out, irreplaceable. That is another fake thing about J. Crew: Its timeless classics cycle out. You five-pocket chinos (the "pant" merchants can take their singular "chino" straight to hell) failed the ultimate test of a wardrobe staple. When I wanted another pair, you were unavailable.
