Wearing the pants in my own damn life, or the IDGAF Jeans

There may be some fashionista phrase more annoying than “boyfriend jeans,” but I’m hard-pressed to think of one as I attempt to reclaim jeans for grown-assed adults.

If you’re unaware or just haven’t been arsed to care — not that I’d blame you — “boyfriend” clothes are all the rage these days. Boyfriend jeans were first, then shorts and shirts and tees and jackets and who knows, maybe socks are next. To the extent that I care about fashion — for reference, see your nearest thimble — I figured out pretty quick that it’s supposed to look like you borrowed those clothes from your boyfriend instead of putting on your own damn clothes.

For the record, I was with my husband more than ten years before the first time I borrowed his shirt, and it was only to annoy him by getting my girl-germs on his Godzilla shirt. Annoying your spouse is a sacrosanct tradition not to be sullied by fashion.

I’m not the first person to find the whole “boyfriend” clothes line a little puerile, and not just because I don’t have a boyfriend and don’t spend my whole life obsessing about what I look like. Hadley Freeman of The Guardian had a great piece about it in 2014 from the safety of London, where theoretically people make a little more sense. (English readers, stop laughing.)

“The ‘boyfriend’ descriptor refers to the idea that the clothes should look as if you borrowed them from your boyfriend — geddit? GEDDIT? — but is really there because the fashion world has…