OMGJeremy

Serious Talk: Whatever Happened to Flannel Shirts?

If you’re young, you’ve only heard talk of them. You hear the quiet whispers in the school hallways, or see a crudely done graffiti tag, or even see a webpage or two on the internet. You bring it up to your parents, and they just nervously laugh and shoo you away, trying hard to busy themselves with whatever they can find close by. They don’t want you to know about it, but you deserve to know! For those of us who grew up around it, we have our own set of questions. Where did it go? Why isn’t it popular anymore? Why was it ever popular? These things are uncertain, but one thing that is for sure is that years ago the flannel shirt was God, and many of us were its children.

In the Beginning

Lumberjack shown actual size.

Flannel started off simply enough as the cloth of choice for lumberjacks and other assorted strong men who were able to do very strong things. These men of great muscle and might needed a fabric that could hold up to their hard living while still keeping them warm and securing their spot as fashion plates. No such thing existed long ago, so the lumberjacks decided to make it so. So a couple of them went off into a log cabin and… well… how to put this. When two lumberjacks love each other very much, they do a special hug and 9 months later flannel is born.

Though the lumberjack that birthed the flannel was no longer able to walk, he looked on with great pride that his fellow lumberjacks finally had a fabric they could trust and also look pretty damn good in. Flannel was a sacred cloth all that time ago, worn ONLY by the toughest of men. I am sure assorted small boys stood in front of the bathroom mirror many times, modeling the flannel garb that belonged to their father. They knew that it was legal for them to be beaten if they were caught wearing it, but still the desire was too great. On a completely unrelated note, the Children of Lumberjacks Cemetery was BOOMING! By some unknown means, flannel slowly slipped into the general population. After several golden years, flannel was now slumming it with non-tough men, children, and even women!

Ashamed and no longer feeling unique in the fashion world, lumberjacks slowly started to die down. Very few remain to this day, and their profession goes on in several poorly put together competitions that may or may not show on ESPN2, depending on whether a spelling bee or poker tournament is available to show instead. Though flannel was taking some heavy hits, the worst was yet to come.

The *shiver* 90′s

Backstage at the Nirvana show.

The 90′s sucked. The entire decade consisted of taking everything that made the 80′s awesome and shitting neon on it to make it cool and IN YER FACE! Music was very much the same. Various “artists” tried their damnedest to make a splash and become remembered amongst the ocean of one hit wonders. Some folks from the “grunge” scene decided the best way was to adorn a near mythic garment… flannel. Knowing that they had to entertain the eyes (so the ears couldn’t pay full attention to how horrible the music was or how the lead singer sounded like a Downie with a mouth full of rocks), they pulled out all the stops and dressed in a garment formerly reserved for near-gods. Then another band did it, and another, and another… because we all know a group is unique and sticking it to the Man when it dresses just like every other group in its genre, praying that you see their video first so you think they actually started it.

These horrible artists had fans, and their fans wore flannel as well. Most to emulate their idols, the others because they learned that flannel hides fat pretty well. Though they didn’t have the “talent” of the ones they looked up to, they were at least able to look like complete douches just like their heroes. Many grunge rockers would later feel remorse for sullying the good name of flannel. Some would drop out of the music scene for good, others would even take their own lives out of shame for disgracing the cloth.

When the dust settled, flannel was on the ropes and hurting. It was down, but not out… but how much longer could it go?

End of Days

Flannel was still something you would often seen worn in the early 2000′s. Then all of a sudden, it stopped. There wasn’t even a gradual decrease, it just stopped as if the heavens called it back up. Now being the average American I feel the need to blame this on someone, and we have MANY culprits my friends.

• Women

High fashion? High ASS-ion!

Lord, don’t they find a way to ruin it all? While the classic image of a woman slinking into the bedroom, clad only in a flannel shirt that barely conceals her lady-parts is welcomed, women found a way to just push it too far. Wearing flannel shirts while NOT trying to be sexy! Flannel made into full outfits! Flannel skirts that go below the thigh! So many forms of blasphemy have been carried out by women who are once again trying to take something special away from men and make it their own. Not content with just sucking away at a mans money and pride, our last way to hearken back to our forefathers was taken away by sniveling bitches who are tired of wearing dead animal flesh or polyester. I do not fault them for hating polyester… it itches.

• Lesbians

This outfit was a cry for help. Good work on missing it.

Sorta like what we said about women, only you can’t call some of them women or they punch you. They punch really hard too. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then these are some pretty sincere bitch-men. Wanting to look like rough and tumble men, these individuals gathered up all the flannel they could find. They crafted shirts that remained somewhat form fitting because deep down they are all 16 year old girls who want folks to stare at their tits, yet made them loose enough to where they could hide their figure on the occasions that estrogen didn’t make them attention whores. Popular rumor is that the worlds richest lesbian bought the rights to flannel, and has restricted the sale of it to only lesbian bars and Lilith Fair.

• Over-doing It

Really?

Mankind generally doesn’t know when he has a good thing going for him. He also doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Flannel in its original shirt form was perfection, a formula that need not be changed. Being the horrible creatures we are, man decided to do the unthinkable… they fucked with flannel. The picture above shows flannel that has been made into a windbreaker-like shirt. Was this necessary? Did the lumberjacks of centuries long since passed need that? It’s a known fact that flannel is already immune to all weather conditions, as well as fire and bullets. In fact it is a little known fact that all bomb shelters built before 1992 were just two 1/4 inch slabs of concrete with flannel stuffing between them. By going and doing this to flannel, man spit in the face of the fabric by expressing its lack of trust in flannel’s ability to repel the wind. My uncle once told me a story of how he saw a man save several small children in a hurricane by taking off his spare flannel shirt and wrapping them in it, thus making the wind unable to pick them up. I’ve had tornado warnings pop up on my television a lot over the years, but I’ve never seen one… and we always keep a flannel shirt in the house, so you do the math! People who believe in the theory that man doomed himself by trying to fix the non-broken traditional flannel shirt believe that the great lumberjacks on the sky simply called their once sacred threads back up, knowing that the world below just wasn’t ready yet.

The Second Coming?

Will flannel shirts ever return? Whether it be because of women, or scary manly women, or just our own stupidity and desire to constantly tinker with everything… is the damage done permanent? I’ve spent an entire article asking questions, so I’m not all of a sudden going to start giving answers. We will just have to wait and see as time goes on. Perhaps one day, on a day like any other, we will step out onto the street and notice out of the corner of our eye… something familiar. We will squint in order to get a better look, realizing that we are now walking through a busy intersection and only still alive because the car that almost hit us swerved at the last second and is now wrapped around a pole, family of four dead. We don’t know why we are drawn to it, it is something primal that calls us. After ignoring the now confirmed 7 dead on the road, the elderly woman we pie-faced, and the homeless man we knocked to the ground and worked the leg over until we heard a snap, we have reached our destination. It’s shining too bright at first, almost too beautiful to lay eyes on. We then catch a glimpse of the design, we feel that familiar fabric between our fingers. A moment of such extreme happiness that a tear runs down. Then we get punched in the face and kicked in the balls and have the flannel snatched from us, because only tough men wear flannel and not crying little bitches.