George Will doesn't like how your ass looks in those jeans.

Crossposted at The Daily Kos and The Stinging Nettle.

George Will, anti-class warrior he, rails against the ubiquity of denim. Good thing conservatives don't believe in the reality of economic class, huh? Well, except they do, so long as they are winning the war. And George Will, ensconced in his protected little enclave of Washington, D.C. and the media bubble, flies into a fit of the vapors at the thought of grown men wearing something other than his own tweedy and ridiculous suits and bowties.

Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not -- authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store -- discordant.

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When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers' tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.

Translation! STAY IN YOUR PROPER SOCIAL STRATA!!!

George Will, who, it must be mentioned, wears a bow tie at every opportunity, fancies himself an expert on and acolyte of America's great agrarian champion, Thomas Jefferson, but merely exemplifies the effete urban tendencies that made Jefferson so bizarrely contradictory. The wearing of blue jeans, and the fact that adults now dress like their children, is, in his words, "an obnoxious misuse of freedom." In a global recession unrivaled in 70 years, this insufferable little prig denounces the wearing of inexpensive yet comfortable clothing by the masses, and ends his laughable column with the following sartorial advice:

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

Ah yes, Kelly and Astaire, reasonable models for all of you struggling to pay your mortgage, but who happen to have the clothing budget of a movie star or the Princess of Monaco.

Idiot.