It’s the latest thing on the fashion scene. Jeans are wrapped around old tyres and literally thrown into the lion’s den (or tiger’s or bear’s), where they are gnawed and slashed and given a unique shredded look. These close encounters with the animal kingdom will probably have no two pairs of jeans that look alike: With random rips here and there, maybe even in places you do not want them to be torn; but they are the new ‘cool’, the latest in a string of novelties, proving that it is still all about jeans.

Not very different for our teen years.

For those of us whose college years were spent in India in the time before foreign goods and goodies were freely available, just owning a pair of Levi’s or Lee was our ultimate ambition. Getting into a college of our choice and doing the course we were suited for was not thought about much. Jeans were first on our list of ‘must haves’ and everything else came a low second.

But we didn’t need a closetful of jeans — like many teenagers (and older clothes horses) today do — so we didn’t ponder over colours or decide between boot cuts, skinnies, comfortable or plus sizes. All it took was one pair of blue jeans, preferably faded in all the right places and looking suitably lived-in, to announce that we had ‘arrived’ on the fashion scene.

But where were we to get our jeans from?

We rarely had anyone visiting from abroad and if they did, it was highly unlikely that our parents would agree to ask them to get us jeans. And if we bypassed our parents and got to them somehow (no Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp or Viber, remember), would they be willing to go out with our measurements, pick up a pair of heavy jeans and lug it across several continents to us? Equally unlikely.

An option we could think of was to hang around the visitor from abroad when he (or she) finally arrived, run errands, make tea, give up our bedrooms, sacrifice the best bits of chicken — generally gain their favour and hope that they would leave behind for us the pair of jeans they had worn out during their travels ...

Of course, that didn’t happen either. Jeans don’t wear out so fast — and how were those visitors to know what motive there was behind our attentions?

Mystical India

So our last resort was to scour the market for a pair of second-hand jeans. Those were the days when many foreign visitors to mystical India stayed on indefinitely, living on a shoestring budget, finally stretching out their resources over their last few days in the country by selling literally all but the clothes on their backs.

There were shops that did a brisk business in old jeans. And quietly, without telling our parents (who would have been horror-stricken if they had known we intended to buy cast-off clothes with dubious origins), we began to save up our paltry pocket money for that paramount prize.

Eventually, midway through our second year of college, we got our second-hand jeans. Not only had our gang of girls achieved its hearts’ desires, but we didn’t need anything more by way of clothing for the next couple of years until we graduated. Our pocket money was ours to enjoy!

Of course, those months of yearning and saving and then getting what we wanted told on our psyches — and even when jeans of all brands flooded the Indian market, it was difficult for us to understand why anyone — male or female — needed more than a single pair of jeans to complete the wardrobe!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.