I went shopping for jeans during my lunch hour yesterday. I hadn’t visited H&M in years, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that, judging from the low prices and the quality of the fabric, their clothes are now designed to be immediately disposable. While I wasn’t particularly taken by how I looked in their $19.95 jeans, I stuck around a bit longer to listen to the music they were playing. It sounded like light 80s funk, but I suppose it’s a new genre that I’m too uncool to know about.
I shuffled off to Banana Republic, despite knowing that the last pair of jeans I bought there made me look like I was wearing adult diapers (I wasn’t!). The music at the store was a little more exciting, and it occurred to me that by going shopping more often I could catch up on borderline-cool new music without the mortification of being rejected by bouncers. The blue jeans at Banana Republic (is anyone else offended by the name of this store, by the way?) were “pre-stressed,” which I find terribly annoying – Baudrillard has been dead for five years and I had hoped we could all move on. Thankfully, as seems to be the norm, there was a Gap next door.
The jeans at the Gap were even crummier, but the khakis looked promising – at least the ones in conservative colors, the ones up front in pastels and fluorescents just confused me. I went into a dressing room, and as I removed my pants I noticed that I was standing on a Flor rug composed of four panels set in the shape of a swastika! I couldn’t fit the whole image on my crappy cell phone camera, so I stood up on the chair in the dressing room, which I realized might seem like I was trying to peek at the other people trying on clothes. As I hurriedly took the photo I heard the camera’s loud click and whirr sound. Convinced that security was going to break down the door and arrest me for indecent behavior I rushed to put my pants back on and fled the store. I don’t remember what music was playing.
Giovanni García-Fenech 
