I have a pair of denim shorts that are, by my own math, the single best cost per wear item I own, twelve dollars at the shop on the corner, worn so many times last summer I stopped counting at forty, which puts them somewhere under thirty cents a wear and honestly probably lower now. My mom took one look at them drying on the balcony and said they look like something you’d wear to demolish a shed. She’s not wrong. That’s kind of my whole point and also where the argument starts.
Because I think a good denim short is supposed to look a little wrecked. Soft in the thigh, pale at the seams, the kind of fade you can’t buy, you have to earn it through repeated bad decisions like sitting on curbs and gardening in them by accident.
My coworker at the homeware brand, the one with opinions about resale value that are usually wrong, thinks that’s just me being cheap and calling it taste. She wears the dark rigid pair, barely broken in, cuffed exactly once, and swears they read more put together with a blouse. She might be right about the blouse part. I have never once worn a blouse with denim shorts and I own four blouses.
Here’s what nobody argues about, the wear count. Mine work with basically anything I already own, a plain tee, a tank, that one oversized button up I stole back from an ex who didn’t deserve it. I counted one week and wore the same pair four different days with four completely different tops and felt like a genius each time, which tells you either they’re great or my wardrobe just isn’t that ambitious. Possibly both.
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Where we really split is what counts as a staple versus what’s just a habit I’ve never questioned. She says a staple should photograph well and mine, frankly, do not, they look like laundry day. I say a staple is whatever you reach for without thinking, and I have not thought about these shorts once in fourteen months, I just put them on.
The gamble here, and I’ll say it plainly, is buying denim shorts distressed enough that they’re basically pre softened, because on the wrong person that reads like they got caught in a wood chipper rather than lived a little. I know this isn’t universally flattering. I bought mine anyway because the fabric was heavy enough not to pill and the math worked, twelve dollars, one summer, still going.
We never fully settled it, her crisp dark pair versus my soft destroyed ones, we just buy separately now and side eye each other’s laundry pile. That’s buy number six for the good column this year, and I’m only slightly embarrassed by how much of my personality is currently riding on a pair of shorts that cost less than my coffee order that week.
