For many years, I had a delightful clothes shopping routine: when I needed a new pair of blue jeans, I would go to Barneys Co-op and try on more or less everything in my size until I found one that met both my criteria (lays nice, all cotton, soft) and my wife’s (flat front, nice shape). I’d buy a pair—preferably on sale, because Barneys could get silly—and then immerse myself into the brand for a while, knowing I had found something that worked, and jeans are usually a repeatable purchase.
My process was quite fun, if a little hit-or-miss. I bought a fantastic pair from Citizens of Humanity, then followed up with a pair of their gray (non-denim) jeans, then discovered that Citizens stopped making 100% cotton pants in favor of elastane blends, so I stopped. Barneys once sold me an amazing pair of vintage-cut Levi’s 501s, which I wore sparingly, because I’ve never found a second pair of Levi’s that fit as well.
But when it worked, it worked. Barneys led me to Earnest Sewn, which were handsome and unbelievably comfortable, and I bought several pairs over the years. Earnest Sewn went out of business, and the founder created a new brand called 3×1; Barneys sold me my first pair of those, too, and I soon had more than one.
Then a few things happened, in rather rapid succession.
- 3×1 went out of business.* This was disappointing but fine—shopping for new jeans is fun. Except a few weeks later…
- Barneys closed. This was a long time coming, but especially sad. No more Co-op; no more Warehouse Sales; no more cutting-edge aspirational department store. And, for me especially, no more vast jeans department. Which almost immediately didn’t matter, because within weeks of that…
- The pandemic hit, and we all stopped shopping in stores for a good long while.
* Nowadays, of course, brands never die, so both Earnest Sewn and 3×1 are back on the market, with their same logos but not the same products. I’m not interested in them at that level.
By mid-2020, I was in a pants rut: my current jeans were wearing out, my preferred maker was gone, and my preferred store for finding new jeans was gone, too. I poked around online and bought a pair or two of other brands, notably one from Raleigh Denim, which I quite liked until they ripped on me within a year (customer service cited “old fabric” and declined to repair them). Not great.
So, in a fit of desperation and creativity, I started crawling the internet and accumulating 3x1s.
I kept my focus narrow. Two styles, one waist size, new or near-new only. I looked at a bunch of websites (Grailed, Poshmark) and discovered, improbably, that eBay was my best source. In all, I bought eight pairs of jeans between February 2020 and July 2023.
This process was imperfect, by which I mean all sales were final, and not all of them fit. Recall that I used to try on a zillion pairs of jeans at a time. Despite the labeling, not every pair was cut the same way; some were too tight in the waist, others too narrow for my body type. But I was also paying pennies on the dollar for old jeans, so I made my peace with the process, and hoped half of them worked out.
My family laughed at me more than once, but the process paid off more than once, too. Interestingly, the jeans I found were quite different from one another. Two pairs looked just like my old ones, and I wear them all the time. A third was extraordinarily soft, and became my go-to WFH pair, although they wore out in the knee rather quickly. Still a nice find.
And I write this blog post today because I just pulled out my greatest find: a new-with-tags selvedge denim pair, original price still stickered ($365!), which were tight when I bought them but now fit me perfectly. I’m wearing them with pride, as though I found them at the store this weekend.
At some point I am going to exhaust my collection of 3x1s. I hope by the time I do I’ll have found a new store where I can have fun trying on new jeans in person.