Matt [who is in his thirties]: Did you ever tight-roll your jeans?
Will [who is twenty-three]: What?
Matt: You didn’t tight-roll your jeans?
Will: I don’t know what that is.
Tara [who is thirty-four]: You fold the leg of your pant over really tight… [demonstrating]
Matt: …and then you roll it up into a little tight cuff. [also demonstrating]
Tara: When I was in high school, we actually used to fold the leg in from the knee down and then safety-pin it.
Matt: And voilà! That’s how you roll a cuff — real tight.
Will: This is how people used to wear their jeans?
Tara: Oh yeah, everyone did.
Will: Why would people do this?
Matt: …
Tara: …
Fin
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Pegging your jeans is nothing. True humiliation is looking back on junior high pictures and realizing you wore 2 pairs of scrunchy socks, color-coordinated with your shirt, pulled over your jeans.
Two things I am perennial grateful for, having lived my formative years in the 1980s. One, that digital cameras didn’t exist. Sure sometimes someone will go through the effort of scanning in prints from high school, but they’re nowhere near as ubiquitous as digital photographs today.
Second, that (even though I love these services now), social networking sites didn’t exist when I was younger. Junior high school was painful and humiliating enough without cyberbullying.
That reminds me – I have to go take a blowtorch to the garage where my folks still have my junior prom pictures stored.
Proud to say, I never tight-rolled my jeans. I did, however, buy them artfully pre-ripped. And then wore them with several pairs of color-coordinated scrunchy socks. And glittery shoelaces. And a side ponytail.
We called it “pennyrolling” our jeans. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the cuff was only about as wide as a penny? Or maybe because the friends who introduced me to the practice made up the name. Or they misheard the actual name, which is likely.
I remember sitting around with my friends pennyrolling my jeans, but then immediately undoing the cuffs before anyone saw me like that. Me, I’m still trying to figure out why I ever wore anything with tapered legs.
One of my co-workers referred to it as “pinch-rolling”? Maybe “penny-rolling” is a derivation of that…somehow?
Also, this photo was taken the same day I wrote the post above. WTF.