It's all about the bottom line

You spend your money (lots of it), and you take your chances.
By JOANN KLIMKIEWICZ
HARTFORD COURANT
It is a second-floor fitting room of Bloomingdale's in Manhattan, that a woman's insecurities are bared, crumpled around her like a pile of unflattering blue jeans.
Sophisticated, intelligent women will disappear behind stalls with armloads of denim, emerging only to scowl at themselves in an unforgiving three-way mirror. They will turn this way and that, peek over their shoulders and twist their backs to scrutinize their bums.
They will ask strangers to assess the plumpness of their backsides, the swell of their thighs. They will trudge back to their stalls dejected, peel off the denim, pour themselves into another pair and do it all over again.
It's all in the quest for the "perfect pair of jeans."
The designer jean raged in the '80s, took a hiatus in the '90s and is upon us again. Only now, it's called "premium denim."
And if the designer craze of the '80s was all about Calvin, Gloria and Jordache, today's second wave is more about fit. More precisely, it's all about the butt.
The new cult of premium denim has such labels as True Religion, Citizens of Humanity and 7 For All Mankind, chic jeans of various washes, embellished with trendy fading, ripping, distressing and whiskering -- denim lingo that means expensive pants ($150 to $400 a pair or more) that look stylishly lived in.
In this cult, devotees pay sinful amounts of money for high-end denim designed to slip on like second skin, clinging to the right curves while lifting and elongating the wrong ones.
"It's a category that's been defined that's not going to go away," says Tom Julian, a trend analyst at Fallon Worldwide in New York.
Denim has become the uniform of the urban hipster, a fashion staple akin to the "nice black pants" of a few years ago. Dress them up, dress them down. Wear them to work with a velvet blazer. Slink on a sequined tank top and you've got a Friday-night outfit. They've even become a mainstay of celebrity red carpets.
But $200 for indigo-colored cotton?
To wear them is to love them
Nancy Becker, 28, says jeans shopping used to mean a stop at the Gap, maybe a splurge on a pair of $80 Lucky Brand Jeans.
But when the New Yorker squiggled into her first pair of premium denim last year, she experienced blue-jean nirvana. And now she's a convert.
"I absolutely loved them," says Becker, who works for a bank. Despite paying around $150, she loved her first pair of Sevens so much that she eventually wore two holes through the back thighs.
For some, status outweighs fit. Aficionados can decipher the loops and logo stitching that wiggle on tushes from New York to Los Angeles. They know which celebrity favors what brand, can instantly differentiate a $150 pair of Joe's Jeans from $275 True Religions.
"It's ridiculous," says Molly Munro, a premium-denim saleswoman at Bloomingdale's.
The 26-year-old does own a pair. But, she says, "people will spend so much money just on jeans. I'm like, do you know how many trips I could take with that money? I could pay my rent for that."
How did it come to this?
Time was, jeans were a strictly utilitarian garment. They were the working-man's uniform, worn for comfort and durability. They became the leisure outfit of World War II soldiers and the rebel wear of the 1950s. They sprouted bell bottoms and painted daises for the flower children of the '60s and '70s.
And then came the designer wave of the '80s, when Jordache's stitched horse-head logo clung to women's behinds and nothing came between Brooke Shields and her Calvins.
Brands like 7 For All Mankind and Blue Cult, both based in California, came on the scene around 2000, preaching a new gospel: lower rises, slimming color washes, softer denim imported from upscale mills in Italy and Spain. All adding up, they said, to the perfect silhouette.
"We're so much more conscious of health and fitness. Women work hard to get the bodies they have, and they want to show it off," explains Tara Narayan, marketing director for Blue Cult. "They don't want to put on something that has a rise all the way up to their bellies. They don't want to look like a big pear, like they're wearing a big sack."