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After the big January blizzard, many buckets of purgatorial rain, a chilly, leafless spring—summer, suddenly. Greenhouse gas has cooked Manhattan into a tropical isle; all the hot, half-dressed girls have returned like robins. It’s getting so there’s no place you can rest your eyes without being assaulted by a salvo of flesh. The subway poles are like strippers’ poles, encircled with the most marvelous and terrifying variety of breasts; but don’t look down, because there’s always that flurry of filthy, flip-flopped feet. And in every other direction: Man ass.
"Ass cleavage is really in right now," said Antonio Jeffery, a national denim specialist at Diesel Jeans in Union Square. Ass cleavage, like regular cleavage, used to be strictly for women. Even the least careful observers of fashion will recall that a few years back, the rises on women’s jeans plummeted with the stock market; at one point, pants got so low that Christine Aguilera was literally prancing in assless chaps. This summer, it’s the men who are artfully displaying the tops of their bottoms, as dudes, gay and straight, squeeze themselves into ever-lower-riding jeans from Paper, Prada and Levi’s. Even the Gap’s in on the action, selling its "1969 extra low boot fit (burnished sky)" denim.
Man ass is suddenly everywhere, from the chichi shopathons of Soho to the hipster suburbia of Williamsburg. There’s so much semi-nudity in New York right now, you’d think you were living in Rio. Just last Friday night, on the Brooklyn-bound L train, an Asian dude posed, scruffy and tan: Between his too-short olive tee and his too-too-low gray Diesel jeans, the buttresses of his pelvic muscles flared architecturally. Try to ignore his pubes. And then, when he exited at the second stop into Williamsburg, his leather shoulder bag shifted just so, revealing the Metallica keychain dangling conspicuously out his back pocket, above which: a full inch of ass crack—at least.
This is becoming the norm—and, according to denim expert Mr. Jeffery (who’d been flown in from Portland, Ore., by Diesel just for the day, surely on urgent denim business), the waists of men’s jeans have actually been sinking like Venice for some time now.
"The rises have progressively dropped lower over the past five or 10 years. We’ve seen the rise go from the belly button to the hips, to right below the hips," he said. "It has definitely picked up a lot of steam over the past few years."
Even dads want to get their asses out there. In Clinton Hill, some punk rocker loaded his toddler into their bright red Volvo station wagon; bending over to install the kid in the car seat, a moon sliver of butt snuck out above his studded silver-and-black belt.
"You got two basic style schools of ass crack: You’ve got the intentional and the unintentional," said Josh Tager, 35, style editor for PlanetOut, a gay and lesbian media company.
Mr. Tager at least respects the unintentional ass-crackers: the hard-at-work plumber, the bent-over grandpa, the generally absent-minded. "It’s not that they’re unaware of sartorial convention; it’s just that they don’t care," he said in their defense. "People snicker behind their backs, and they point at their cracks—and do they pull up their pants? No. And I think this makes them bona fide rebels."
http://observer.com/pages/frontpage5.asp
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