WindowDressing: On the Swift, Strange Rise of Bad Ideas

My question—and I understand its absurdism—touches the depths of inanity among people for whom the dross of popular culture approaches the sacred, an odd sort of sanctity that becomes, for a moment until the next fad arrives, an inviolable and definitive part of life.

So here’s the metaphor, and if it disturbs you, I apologize in advance.

Imagine a new kind of jeans.

A startup with a flashy logo and a clever name like WindowDressing, introduces a line of high-quality denim. You know how these things begin: limited production, hand-stitched, whispered about in industry-only fashion newsletters. But here’s what makes them special: in the back of the jeans there’s an oval window—a transparent portal that reveals, unmistakably, your entire ass. Not a small peek, not a teasing cutout, but an unambiguous panoramic unveiling.

The window, made of fog-proof plastic (a patented polymer!) is sturdy and condensation-resistant, at least in the early editions.

Now imagine that WindowDressing secures a superstar musician to launch them. The video rollout appears on social media, where such things gestate. It’s cinematic, aspirational, slyly subversive. She wears them while dancing at a club, exiting Pilates, rising from a costly lunch of organic greens, leafing through a glossy magazine, and gavotting through Central Park. And all the while, her entire backside remains visible—curated, lit, framed, proudly displayed.

The video goes viral. Articles appear. The New York Times fashion section runs a piece on radical textile transparency. The New Yorker publishes something called The Post-Privacy Moment: The Revelation of Self to the Self.

The first run sells for $2,500. They are scarce, therefore coveted. Early adopters are beautiful, fearless, yoga-toned, and perfectly at ease with personal exhibition as identity.

Then diffusion begins.

Cheaper versions appear. The fog-proof plastic steams up after a jog or extended sitting. The stitching weakens. The denim thins. Soon the jeans appear on Amazon. Weeks later they arrive at Costco and Target. Eventually, beneath the unkind fluorescent lighting of Walmart, they hit $99.98, occasionally marked down to $79.98. The window remains; the message (whatever it is) remains; the cachet remains.

Now comes the question, not morally, not judgmentally, but anthropologically:

How long would it take for a sizeable percentage of young women (and later, men) to wear these jeans?

Given the velocity of trend adoption, the thinness of taboo, and the relentless logic of “Why not?” What? A year? Six months? Six weeks?

We’ve seen stranger phenomena become standard.

The jeans aren’t the point; they are merely parable. A study in normalization. What begins as absurd becomes daring. What is daring becomes ubiquitous. What is ubiquitous becomes ordinary. What was private becomes—like so much else—content.

This movement is not confined to denim. Political frameworks undergo the same evolution. Ideas once confined to fringe faculty lounges become institutional policy. Provocations become doctrines. Beliefs that sounded satirical just a few years ago show up pre-labeled as moral imperatives.

And people, often reluctantly, adapt. Not always because they believe, but because disbelief has a cost. To dissent is to fracture belonging. To question is to risk exile from the ever-shrinking circle of permitted thought.

Something begins as objectionable, then becomes intriguing, then desirable, then normal, and eventually—mandatory. Only at the far end of that movement do we pause to ask: Did we choose this? Or did it choose us? Are we wearing these jeans, or have the jeans begun wearing us?

Is the oval window liberation—or requirement?

Did culture shift because we believed something, or because belief itself was replaced by something softer, simpler, lazier: compliance?

And at what point do we realize that an absurdity—or in the worst cases, an outright evil—held aloft long enough, endorsed by beautiful, loud, compelling, or frightening people, becomes indistinguishable from truth in the public square? And sanctioned by the very people who would have laughed—or blushed with shame—just last season at the prospect of such a garment, or such an ideology, existing at all.

I used to wear jeans torn at the knees. Everyone did. It was cool. One night, out for ice cream with my dad and my girlfriend, he said, “Pete, let me see those pants.” I assumed he wanted to examine the wash or critique the fray. Instead, laughing, he grabbed the fabric and ripped them further—straight up the thigh until they resembled a denim kilt. He leaned back as if to say, If you’re going to walk around with holes, commit.

I walked into the parking lot like that—underwear exposed, bony legs free to the air—and I laughed. He was right. Why was I parading around with holes in my jeans? Why was anyone?

The answer was embarrassingly simple: because everyone was doing it. We had collectively declared unraveling fashionable. Was it—some suggested—a gesture of solidarity with people who couldn’t afford new clothing? I doubt I ever believed that, or even thought about it. To resist would have been to stand outside the current. And very few willingly stand outside a current.

Sometimes it takes a father ripping your jeans into a kilt to reveal how flimsy an idea truly is.

The older I get, the more I see how thin our convictions become when pressed against that force. The jeans were harmless, but the mechanism behind them was not. It can bend truth. It can bend loyalty. It can bend the cost of belonging.

No one sets out to follow absurdity. Absurdity simply becomes familiar. And familiarity—repeated enough—becomes reality.

And that “reality,” once blessed by consensus, becomes a kind of false god.

No doubt we need more windows. We desperately need to see things more clearly. But the last thing we need is more window dressing.