It's finally over: Awards season has folded. Red carpets have been rolled up. Oscars have been won. And Leonardo DiCaprio can slip back into his Dad Jeans for Childless Man™.
No number of tuxedos, acceptance speeches, or environmentalist calls-to-action can erase my memories of Leo's wide-legged denim or his thirst for roominess in a pantaloon. No: His determination to dress like David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian circa 1994 transcends even his most dapper red carpet look. He is our dads at Homebase on a Saturday, our uncles at the BBQ on a Sunday afternoon. He is a 41-year-old Oscar winner whose wardrobe reminds us all of our impending mortality. And I can't get enough of it.
I pretend his jeans bother me. I tell myself his aesthetic is tragic, an abomination, I pretend that I'd be upset to find out that it takes no less than four hours to remove his jeans and sift through the excess fabric in moments of passion. I conjure the image of Bar Refaeli asking, "How wide-legged are these jeans?!" in one of their late-relationship arguments, knowing that if forced to choose, Leo would choose acres of denim before he chose true love.
And then rationality sneaks up on me, on my matching jogging suit, and on my half-eaten box of Arrowroot cookies: Death is coming for all of us, one denim pant leg at a time.
We couldn't expect Leo to stay 23. We couldn't expect that, at 41, Leonardo DiCaprio, a man whose fashion sense once consisted of plaid pants, a leather jacket, and an accessory called David Blaine, would rise like a phoenix to embrace the aesthetic of 2016. The man had professional and personal success since he's been a wee boy, and we all know fashion works best with people who've had to work through who they are, who they were, and who they're going to be. Leo has always been a movie star. In real life, he's got nothing to prove: He's a middle-aged man who wants to wear baggy jeans.
Ill-fitting pants will happen to all of us. To you, to me, we will all grow up and surrender our souls to slacks so baggy, so wide, and so comfortable that should we find ourselves in a Revenant-like situation, we will use them as a tent or as a blanket or as a raft. We will run around with super-soakers in cargo shorts as if the weight of the world is off our shoulders. We will roll down the windows of our cars, close our eyes, and feel the warmth of sartorial freedom, reminding ourselves that in that moment, we are infinite. We should be so lucky.
Which means I cannot judge Leo. I can't pick fights with him over how, outside a Y2K-era rave, wide-legged pants are not appropriate. I can't tell him he has no right to wear a newsboy hat, or to wear shorts so low the world knows his affinity for striped boxers. I can't reference the models that have accidentally fell into a pit of denim while en route to the bathroom, having to be pulled from Leo's laundry pile with only seconds to spare before suffocation, only to realize there are just two pairs of jeans on the floor, max. I cannot judge.
For Leo could be you or me. And while I abhor his choice to dress like the dads I saw at my friends' hockey training in the '90s, I cannot throw stones. My glass house is not insured, and I too might aesthetically die one day. We all might. But what if, in that death, we find life?
