Nordstrom Is Selling Dirty Pants

No one should spend $425 on these pants.

Here are some pants for the discerning consumer who wants to look like they’ve built a stone wall with their bare hands or landscaped someone else’s summer home. They are jeans, like everyone wears for the most part, but with one confounding and relatively expensive feature: dirt.

Nordstrom sells jeans with fake mud on them for $425; Critics let loose

These are jeans sold by a brand called PRPS — the absence of vowels being an indicator of how expensive they are as well as any dubious cultural cachet attached — and cost a whopping $425. They’re caked in mud — a “muddy coating” to be preceise. They also come with a matching denim jacket at the same price, if you want to really double down on the confusing sartorial message of dressing like you’ve just done farm work while commuting on your $3,000 Dutch bike to your job as senior VP of something-something at Big Fancy Startup That Wants to Change The World.

The description of said pants from Nordstrom’s website raises a few very important questions, thoughts and concerns.

Heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that’s seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.

• Why would you need some pants to embody “rugged Americana” when you can just do some yardwork and achieve the same effect?
• It’s pointless to point out how rude and tone-deaf this is to people, who, you know, actually do work that would make their jeans to be dirty for a living, but I’ll say it anyway — this is rude.
• About this “crackled, caked-on muddy coating” — are these pants machine-washable? Will the coating degrade? Will everything else you wash with these pants be affected by the “muddy coating” as well? Do these pants have that sort of gritty texture that actually dirty jeans have? Will they smell? What happens when it rains?
• Yeah, yeah, they make pre-ripped jeans now, but those aren’t meant to evoke work that you haven’t done. They’re just ripped. For fashion.

A quick peruse of PRPS’s other offerings show that their prices hover in the top range of Fancy Jean prices, at around $190 or so. The additional $235 you spend if you chose to buy the muddy pants is probably paying for the mud, right? Maybe it’s paying for the people that sploosh the mud onto the pants or the special patent-pending machine that arranges it just so. Or maybe these pants are an insanely-priced ripoff that no one needs because it is ridiculous to buy a pair of pants that make it look like you’ve spend time outside for a living when you really don’t.

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