Light Wash Denim Styles

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 34: SPRING/SUMMER 2025

One time I was at a house party that someone I barely knew brought me to because they didn’t want to show up alone. They abandoned me in the kitchen, where people I’d never seen before stood in tight clusters as if they were planning a war strategy or doing some sort of sports thing. I guess they were probably just talking to each other. I looked around for something to hold, like a drink, and wondered if I should leave. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and I felt as if they were all just waiting for me to go so they could get on with the real party, which would begin as soon as I left.

I was considering melting into the floor when a girl with a stylish-yet-carefree haircut came into the kitchen. She looked me up and down and told me I seemed like the type of person who would fold jeans at the Madewell in the mall. I squeezed whatever was in my hand—a cup, probably with soda in it, because beer made me gassy. A guy standing nearby wearing a shaggy secondhand coat laughed. He was drunk on locally made hard cider, and also he was into her. Who wouldn’t be? Her bangs were the perfect length. I don’t think he noticed that I was there, and yet there I was, thinking about the Madewell in the mall, where I had been the day before to buy the very shirt I was wearing at that exact moment. I felt all the blood rush to my face, which was great because a splash of rosacea was exactly what I needed.

But the girl was right. I remembered vividly that everyone working at the Madewell in the mall was a mid-twenties woman with a Midwestern body, nondescript brown hair, bangs too long for the shape of their face, and a smile that didn’t seem fake necessarily, just strained. So me, basically. They all looked like me. And though it would have been fine and more up my alley to hate myself for being unremarkable, it seemed interesting to try to feel good about it. The Internet had told me once that being “normal” was more normal in other countries, especially cold ones, like Sweden, and I’ve always loved their oat milk. So I went home and did things that were uninteresting but important, like brushing my teeth and refreshing the news app on my phone every fifteen seconds until the next day suddenly happened. 

In the morning, I put on my rosacea medicine and, with the girl from the party’s words repeating on a loop in my head, I went straight for the Madewell in the mall, where I approached a table covered in jeans and just started folding light-wash denim with confidence.

The other retail associates eyed me with suspicion, but no one confronted me. We were all avoidant people-pleasers too concerned with being seen as likable. I was naturally good at folding, because I’ve always been a very good little girl, but almost everything in the store was already folded, so after twenty minutes of clomping around in my clompers, I mean clogs, I started to get the anxiety trembles. The anxiety trembles is an affliction that affects many Midwesterners as well as women from inland or central California. Symptoms include doom-thinking, nervous laughter, missing your mother, uncontrollable shaking, and flashbacks to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. The other retail associates recognized my symptoms and smiled their weary grins, knowing full well that I was about to self-destruct.

But then, suddenly, a chaotic woman with crazy hands and the fearful eyes of a house rabbit came in. She looked like my mother. She also looked like Mariska Hargitay, who my mother had once met at a camp when they were both little girls. The woman bolted for me, clutched my shoulders, and said, “Quick! Where are the office-appropriate blouses?”

This was my moment. Something was happening and it was my chance to prove that I belonged. I wondered who I was proving this to. Sweden? That girl from the party? I didn’t really know. I took the woman’s hands, which felt like a soft pretzel because they were. Or no, she had hands, but she was holding a pretzel. I grabbed one end of the pretzel, looked her in her beautiful mom-colored eyes, and asked, uncertainly, “What sort of story do you want the blouse to tell?”

Her eyes widened and she trembled as if she were about to overheat. “All I know is I want something that sets me apart as slightly unique but doesn’t turn me into a character at work,” she said. “I’d hate to be the office golden boy.”

I nodded my head as if I understood. “You’re saying you want to appear mildly creative, with midlevel management capabilities, but not so special that people ask you for your opinion too much.”

“Yes, exactly that!”

So I guess I did understand what she was talking about. Maybe I’d been underestimating myself. 

I looked around. Perhaps this Madewell in the mall really was the place where I belonged. And who cared if it smelled like Mongolian barbecue and was a stone’s throw away from a Claire’s, where Christian tweens screamed their first curse words as they got their ears pierced?

The other retail associates eyed me from behind curtains of somewhat flattering A-line dresses. They were becoming curious. Several of them pretended to sort chunky gold earrings on a marble table in order from least to most chunky but, really, they were watching me. The moment felt important, and I wondered if I was experiencing inertia. I didn’t really know what that word meant, but I still used it incorrectly in a sentence at least once a day.

The rabbit-eyed woman was staring at me expectantly. I looked at her closely and no longer saw my mother or Mariska Hargitay. She was her own person and she needed my help.

So I went for it. I began to swing us in circles while holding on to the soft pretzel. We spun faster and faster and then I released us, launching us into inertia, probably. We careened off the walls while I showcased to the woman everything we had in store for her with a Willy Wonka–like enthusiasm.

“Need a pin-striped collared shirt?” I cried. “We’ve got three styles in six shades of navy blue.” Then I spun us to the wall of shoes. “In need of trendy yet practical footwear? We have ankle booties, loafers, and elevated slip-on sneakers for fall. Available in black and tan only.”

“But where do I begin?” she shouted through the wind we were making. “Everything is nearly the same, and it’s stoking my vertigo.”

I blinked and brought us to a vibrating stillness. The soft pretzel was gone, maybe lost inside a shoe somewhere, so I put her small, empty hands into the shallow pockets of her jeans.

For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what to say. “Let’s start with denim. You need something with deeper pockets. Do you like the kick-flare style? Wait no, shh, don’t tell me.” I pressed my finger to her lips and took a deep breath. “Your aura is speaking and it wants something with a wide leg and a generous gusset.”

The woman gasped. Her rabbit eyes relaxed and her whole body exhaled as she released some sort of pent-up gas she’d been holding on to for years, probably. It smelled like hand soap and Jamba Juice. I nudged her into the center of the store and let her explore, because I knew that she was ready. She purchased a pair of wide-leg jeans in a wash called agave and left the store with a stride so light she barely touched the ground. She had come to the mall for one thing: to be seen.

When she was gone, the retail associates came out of hiding. They clicked feverishly at their Bluetooth headsets. It sounded like applause.

“No one has ever used the word gusset with such genuine intention before,” a girl who looked just like me said. The crowd parted as the girl with the biggest Bluetooth headset and the best bangs appeared. It was the girl from the party. She put a lanyard around my neck, a cropped button-up over my shoulders, and whispered the most beautiful words I’d ever heard into my good ear. “Welcome home, stylist,” she said. “Would you like your paychecks delivered via direct deposit or mail?”

Obviously direct deposit, I thought. I didn’t even have a mailbox. Or no. I definitely did, somewhere, and inside it there were probably hundreds of unread birthday cards from my grandma, bills from my energy company, catalogs from Crate & Barrel, and countless letters from the Audubon Society pleading for me to send them more money for their precious birds. People were trying to contact me, to congratulate me, to offer me 20 percent off if I switched to a new phone plan. And yet I was always feeling like I didn’t matter. But I mattered to those people. They wanted things from me and some of them, like my grandma, loved me. I looked at the girl with the perfect bangs and saw a more distilled, more attractive, more at-home-in-her-body version of myself. I remembered what she had said to me at the party and realized that what I had thought was an insult was actually her trying to connect with me, maybe even offer me a job.

“I’d love to start on Monday,” I said to her.

“But it’s Wednesday.”

I left, running through the French doors and across the slick mall floor without slipping, not even once, and though I thought about stopping to get a pretzel I knew that I needed something more substantial to fuel me for this new trajectory I was on. Things were finally making sense, and for the first time I knew exactly what my body needed. And what it needed was Mongolian barbecue.