Disproportionate Excitement: Jeans Day at Work

I have a few more posts on Peru, but let’s take a little break to discuss something even more exciting and earth shaking than pisco sours and ancient ruins.

Last Friday was Jeans Day at work.

This is a very big deal. Honestly, HR could have told me they had installed a kitten playpen next to an all-you-can-eat, make-your-own sundae bar and I would have been kinda blasé about it. But Jeans Day? I was dancing around like Honey Boo Boo with a bag of Cheetos and a Red Bull.

You see, while many of you work in relative sartorial freedom, I work at a very conservative place where even a hint of chambray is considered quite risqué.

We usually only get one shot at Jeans Day around these parts. That would be to support the Lee National Denim Day. Cough up $5 and you get to wear jeans on one Friday in October. But somehow, someone on some work committee over here realized how lucrative this proposition could be, and now we’ve done it two other times in the last six months to raise money for animals and food banks. Or maybe we were raising funds for bank animals (like piggy banks, I think). Or veterans who hire animals to work at food banks? Or something. Doesn’t matter.

While Jeans Day is all very, very exciting, it also caused me a bit of paralysis. What jeans would I wear? I feel like boyfriend jeans are definitely out. Too casual. Could I wear skinny jeans or are those too going-to-da-club? Should I wear my black skinny jeans, or is that just wasting a jean opportunity since that’s kind of similar to skinny black pants, which are allowed at work? What about my coated jeans? Or do those look too much like leather? Wait, we don’t have any rules per se about leather, right? It’s just kinda frowned upon.

Then there’s the whole issue of what to wear with the jeans. I wear jeans on the weekend, usually with t-shirts, flannel shirts and boots. Not really work appropriate, I think. Unless one is going to work at the truck stop down the road.

I also briefly flirted with the idea of going just denim crazy and wearing a denim shirt dress I have.

In the end, the crappy, still-cold weather dictated that I wear a sweater, blazer and scarf. And since my blazer was navy and my skinny jeans were a dark wash, it sorta looked like I had a suit on anyway.

Oh well. There’s always next Jeans Day. Maybe it’ll be in the summer and I can wear a denim bathing suit.