Custom Illustrated and Painted Jeans

I’ve always had an aversion to family stories. Not that I dislike families telling stories about each other. After all, it’s often our families that know how to wind us up, or point out, ideally with warmth and humour, our more ridiculous idiosyncrasies. 

The stories that I don’t like are the ones that get repeated, and often embellished over time, becoming the core texts of a family’s mythology. Do you remember that time that grandpa got arrested at the border, or when your sibling abruptly rejected their spouse when they first met?

All stories are abstractions. Combine that with the fact that our average family member is not a particularly good story teller, and the result can often be a simplistic, sometimes constraining, representation. 

So when I asked my dad if he would create a pair of pants for me based on images and stories from our lives, it was with some trepidation. 

I first got the idea for the pants from an episode about senior cords on the Articles of Interest podcast. Senior cords were a phenomenon that peaked between the 1940s and 1960s in specific areas of Indianna, where college (or high-school) seniors would draw and paint on corduroy pants, choosing personalized words and images to commemorate their years at school. 

I was drawn to the idea of senior cords because of the way they jumpstart connection and nostalgia. One of the things I like most about clothing is the way that we form relationships with what we wear. After wearing something for years, it can become imbued with nostalgia, often part of the way that we remember a particular period of life. Cover a piece of clothing in personal imagery, and you’re building in some of this connection and nostalgia from the start. 

My dad, Randolph Parker, is an artist. He paints gorgeous landscapes that vibrate with harmonies in colour and pattern, managing to be both meticulously detailed and deeply emotional. Growing up, art was everywhere for my sister and I. It was part of the language and rhythm of our family. Unlike most of our friends’ families, our dad wasn’t at work out of the house. He was in the studio, or, more often than not, taking care of us, driving us to school, picking us up, and working late into the night to compensate. 

Working on this project together was an interesting experience. When you bring an idea to someone creative, like an artist, graphic designer or writer, you hand over the execution to someone else’s talents and ways of seeing. My dad and I had a lot of good discussion, brainstorming, deliberating on aesthetics and style. But ultimately I didn’t know how they would turn out, and had to make peace with that. 

At some point in the process, it became clear to me that I wanted the pants to be about him. The life of every person is subtly shaped and guided by powerful images, perhaps impressed upon us in early years, that somehow capture the important qualities of those that we have cared for, and those that care for us. I didn’t want to capture my own story. Rather, I wanted to isolate these images that represented my father. Of course, he asserted his own ideas and images in the process. The result is a kind of collaborative telling, and shared abstraction, that encompasses my dad, but also the continuity and connections between our lives. 

The last image that he added to the pants is a portrait of my wife and I with our two kids. The symbolism is as obvious as it is true. We are preceded by the stories that come before us, and carry those stories into the future.

Some of my favorite images include a self portrait of my dad when he was 20, a box of raisin bran cereal, a portrait of my grandmother surrounded by roses, and the red minivan that our family drove during my childhood and youth. There are stories and deep associations behind each of these images, and it fills me with joy and gratitude to see them so artfully rendered, and lovingly collected. 

The jeans are Levi’s 501 (90s fit) ecru. They’re the woman’s version. I wanted them to fit well in the waist, but have a wide roomy leg. The woman’s version of this relaxed fit provided the best solution. I also wanted them to be cropped so that the artwork is not distorted by any breaks as they are worn. If I could make any changes, I think I would add an inch to the inseam, and I am considering taking out the hemming to see if that helps to make the crop a little less severe.

I plan to wear these mainly on special occasions, and to keep them for the rest of my life.