Mike Rowe is not the type of guy to sugarcoat his feelings. Whether he’s calling out Bernie Sanders or laying waste to internet trolls, the former Dirty Jobs host and champion of the working man can always be counted on to tell it like it is.
The latest target of Rowe’s ire comes in the form of a pair of $425 “Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans” currently being sold at Nordstrom, which boast “a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.” Yes, for the mere price of a car payment, basically, you can rock the look of someone who works a blue collar job for a living, yet who enjoys the salary of a white collar investment banker.
Predictably, Mike Rowe was not amused, writing a lengthy and savage diatribe on Facebook, his medium of choice, about this “latest assault” from the department store.
In the post, in which he even admits to the appeal of buying broken-in jeans, he elaborates:
I mean really, who has time these days to wait for a pair of jeans to naturally fade? I also understand the different cuts. Might as well get something that fits and feels comfortable. But they lost me years ago with their various stages of “distress.” The stone wash and the acid wash the rinsed wash and the bleached wash… And they really lost me when they started tearing holes in them on purpose.
I saw a pair of jeans at Macy’s the other day that looked like they’d been bathed in boric acid, hung up and shot multiple times with a twelve-gauge, and then pounded on a rock down by the river. They too, were on sale, for $249.00.
But forget the jeans themselves for a moment, and their price, and look again at the actual description. “Rugged Americana” is now synonymous with a “caked-on, muddy coating.” Not real mud. Fake mud. Something to foster the illusion of work. The illusion of effort. Or perhaps, for those who actually buy them, the illusion of sanity.
He finishes up the post by joking about a “borax wash” that he apparently discovered several years ago while helping to rescue birds at Searles Lake (an endorheic dry lake located in the Mojave Desert), which will apparently destroy your jeans to the point of no longer being able to wear them. As a fool and his money will always be parted, maybe best to not give them any ideas…
(Via NBC 4)