They’ll Get You Everytime

While we’re talking about pants to ride bikes in I thought I’d tell you about when Carhartt shifted focus from work wear to street wear and doubled their prices.

In the early 90’s Carhartt was still solely a working person’s brand. The jeans cost $15 and you had to go to a worker store to buy them. When teenagers started buying (and stealing) them the stores got wise and raised their prices. Carhartt eventually picked up on what the stores were doing and raised their wholesale prices as well. The stores then raised their prices even more.

So a pair of $15 jeans became $30 jeans just because of a fad. It’s not like this happened over 25 years, it took maybe a year.

So anyway $30 isn’t a bad price considering that certain brands are pushing over $100 for a pair of bike jeans.

And also, I don’t really give a shit what pants you wear.

But I do agree with Solomon, that commercial is pretty weak.

They should make a commercial featuring some real commuters-Like 55 year old dudes with rear view mirrors attached to their helmets riding hybrids covered in pannier bags.

Or show some people with a big fat back and ass crack sticking out of their jeans-

That’s what I notice about people wearing these types of fashion pants.

Young ass t-shirt, tight ass low ride jeans, naked back.

Anyway I guess the other aspect of this is what made a lot of things cool was finding and adapting them for being a messenger.

Let me put it to you this way:

Hightop shelltoes were cool for work, because the rubber toe guard protected your sneakers and feet from sharp toe cages. No one was marketing them at you, they just worked and looked good.

But…

If a hightop shelltoe was released now with “commuter” written on them they’d be dumb as shit and only for posers.

You see how it works.

So if you go to the army/navy store and find some weird ass, wool Belgian Army knickers for $15 that would be cool.

But…

If some fashion brand made them and wrote “commuter” all over the place and charged $150 they’d be corny as shit and only for posers.

It’s like the track bike-

A track bike designed for the velodrome adapted for street use by a messenger was cool.

But…

A fixie designed for the street with “messenger” or “commuter” or “some other dumb shit” marketing just isn’t cool at all.

I know some people reading this are like “whaaaaaaat” about this stuff – that’s just because you don’t understand the blog.