Don’t Dress Like Someone You Are Not

Along with beards, you’ll see unlikely urban men wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans, and work boots—pretending to be something they’re not—while they sip lattes at Starbucks type text messages with moisturized thumbs. Tom Puzak at GearJunkie labelled these wannabe men “lumbersexuals.” Puzak wrote, “He looks like a man of the woods, but works at The Nerdery, programming for a healthy salary and benefits. His backpack carries a MacBook Air, but looks like it should carry a lumberjack’s axe. He is the Lumbersexual.”

Some have even been seen sporting fake dirty jeans—like Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans from Nordstrom that retail for more than $400 and come with fake dirt plastered on them. Mike Rowe, best known as the host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, ridiculed anyone who might buy the fake dirty jeans. He called such men “inauthentic,” and said their pants are “something to foster the illusion of work. The illusion of effort. Or perhaps, for those who actually buy them, the illusion of sanity.”

What got us to a place where a store is betting that people will pay $420 (or more) for “dirty” jeans so they can pretend to be something they’re not? Talk about someone with a pathetic, inauthentic life. Isn’t America supposed to be a place where people roll up their shirtsleeves to get things done, a place where people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps? Are we fast becoming a country of fakers?

America, after all, has long been a place where we ask those we meet, “What do you do?” Europeans rarely ask this question. In Japan this question is actually considered impolite. America, in contrast, was always a nation of doers. It’s in our cultural DNA to define ourselves by our hard work. Our value, our sense of self-worth, falls if we don’t know how to start a fire, change a tire, or fell a tree—and if you don’t know how to do these things, you should learn how to do them, not fake it and try to appear like someone who can (but who can’t).