Monday morning, my roommate bursted into our dorm, an unmistakable look of horror and nausea on her face. I knew it must have been fashion related.

Before she could say anything, I tried to calm her down. “Don’t worry. It’s true that bubble skirts are back, but there are support groups for people like you.”

“No. It’s not the bubble skirts,” she replied. “I just saw a guy in my history class wearing the tightest pants. Seriously, they were like, three sizes too small. If I was the clerk who sold him those pants, I wouldn’t have let him out of the store unless he told me they were for his girl-friend.”

Ah, yes. The lament of the male tight pants. Let it be known that there is a dif-ference between tight pants and skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are what the Italian men wear. They know their clothes like their moms know pasta. Conscious fashion deci-sions from the male community have been taking place over there for a loooong time. When the Italian boys wake up, they don’t wear what’s on the top of their dirty laundry pile. They wear what they laid out the night before.

When the American boys noticed all the babes that the Italians always got, they started putting two and two together and shopped for skinny jeans as well. Alas, without the historical knowledge of fine fashion, which is inherent in Italian culture, our American men figured raiding their little sister’s closets would be enough to woo the women.

Ew.

However, some boys did get it right. Most of them are either Italian-American or have girlfriends who know how to dress their men. The rest took a leaf out of the scene kid’s book.

I’d like to put in a plug for the scene kids. You almost have to feel sorry for them. They’ve been wearing skinny jeans for years. That was probably mad difficult to do before these pants became the rage. The only place you could find jeans like that was in your mom’s forgotten box of ’80s clothing in the attic.

Sooner or later the scene kids are always turned to for mainstream fashion inspi-ration. Unfortunately, this destroys their very way of life. Long gone are the days when they could pick potential friends out of a massive crowd based solely on how constricting their pants were.

Now the very people they conformed against in the first place are donning their fashions. It’s only a matter of time before the fashionable boys are forced to come up with another original idea to set themselves apart from the mob. Let’s hope that idea isn’t parachute pants.