BY: DANIEL KORN
Skinny jeans have always been pretty ridiculous. I’m not going to be so naïve as to say that they don’t look good; heck, I tried on a pair in high school once, but my stocky build and particularly fat ass is simply not conducive to form-fitting clothes that require both a zipper and a button. It was probably a blessing in disguise though, because the practical negatives of skinny jeans far outweigh the aesthetic positives. Why would you want pants that constrict your movement so much that you can’t even pick up loose change? What good is a bunch of britches with no pocket space? Why not just go with tights, which cling as well or better to the glutes while offering comfort and flexibility? Skinny jeans have been made fun of for decades at this point, from punks to scenesters to emokids to hipsters. And yet, though the fashions may change, the skinny jeans have stubbornly remained.
Perhaps a new case study will sway the young and hip from taking a fashion-first approach. In the newest issue of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Australian Drs. Karmen Wai, Philip Douglas Thompson, and Thomas Edmund Kimber describe a curious incident where a 35-year old woman was hospitalized for four days due to her skinny jeans.
The woman, who was not named, was helping a family member move, and felt her pants get “increasingly tight and uncomfortable” throughout the day. On the way home, she tripped and fell due to foot numbness, and, as yet more evidence of the Bystander Effect in action, remained in the street for several hours before finally being taken to a hospital. When she got there, her lower legs were so swollen that the doctors had to cut her jeans off. Thankfully, when she got out four days later, she’d made a full recovery.
The theory is that the tightness of the jeans squeezed her nerves so much that her legs suffered severe muscle damage, likely due to the fact that she was squatting a lot while lifting things during the move.
This is the first documented case of skinny jean-caused damage in the lower leg, though there have been a few concerning the upper leg, noted as early as 2003. In a 2012 article from The Daily Mail on the same subject, Dr. Karen Boyle recommends swapping the constricting pantaloons for jeggings or jeans that at least have a bit of stretchiness in them.
So it might just be time to finally throw those skinny jeans away, which will probably be easy, as you should be able to Hulk out of them in no time with a mere flex of the quadricep.
Sources: menstylefashion.com, abcnews.com
