I stood in the dressing room staring down a six-button labyrinth, wondering what had happened to jeans as a concept. Had we come this far, and yet, not far at all? Was this 2022? 1992? Or, more accurately, 1942? Were we caught in a denim feedback loop?

You know the button fly I'm talking about. Before the proliferation of zippers, a row of buttons was simply a functional necessity. Still, despite mankind's many technological advances, the fashion Gargamels periodically revert to button-fly jeans as a trend.

Button-fly jeans are a special kind of hell, with tiny, covert crevices sliced into an inch-wide channel of denim. Securing the bottom button is like winning "American Ninja Warrior." The buttons must slide perfectly into the hidden pockets at the exact right angle, chin pressed to chest, shirt all bunched around the armpits, a line of four impatient ladies waiting outside the stall. I am telling you: this is not the kind of manual dexterity test I need at a Red Robin!

So, those were out.

I was in Old Navy, America's most deranged carnival of denim. The sheer variety of jeans in Old Navy is staggering, overwhelming, sometimes disheartening. It's like the designers are trying to see what they can get away with. On this trip, I witnessed a style called Extra High-Rise Balloon Ankle jeans, which look exactly as described.

Are we supposed to look good anymore? What is good? Have I simply conflated the notion of "good" with "skinny" because I was raised by my mother, Paris Hilton? Am I getting hives?

A few months ago, I endeavored to do the impossible: UPDATE MY JEANS STYLE due to societal pressure. I ordered a pair of Old Navy Mid-Rise Boyfriend Straight jeans online. They had a higher waist, a lighter wash and a baggier shape than my geriatric millennial skinny jeans. Because of, I guess, body dysmorphia, I ordered them way too large.

My stepdaughter assured me they were extremely cool. My husband politely suggested I tie a shoestring around the two back belt loops, which... I mean... I haven't worked this hard in life to become someone loping around in strange, pear-shaped, ripped-knee jeans with a shoelace holding up the backside.

However, these giant jeans were comfortable. Really comfortable. More comfortable than any jeans I've ever worn, which is the intent of jeans? They have "boyfriend" in the name, after all, a subliminal signifier of looseness, ease, respite from the shrink-wrapped torture devices many women have squeezed into since the dawn of the sun. Boyfriends: they get to be comfortable and no one else.

The giant boyfriend jeans quickly became a stand-in for sweatpants around the house. I wore them in public on a few occasions, tugging at the waistband the entire time and feeling, well, hideous.

It's hard to welcome anything new when toxic fashion is ingrained in your amygdala. I graduated high school in 2001, a perilous time for jeans. We're talking painted on, shoe-gobbling, too low-rise to sit. It was a sick time to be a girl, really, the tabloid era. The emergence of dark, high-rise skinny jeans in the 2010s felt like a gentle hug for both our self-loathing and lower abdomens.

A looser jeans aesthetic should be a welcome trend for those of us still mentally imprisoned inside a Perez Hilton blog post, no? Why is the journey so loaded?

Last week, I shared a tweet from Carlye Wisel that made me laugh: "Elder millennials: brace yourselves for what's about to come."

Wide-leg, zip-off jeans with cargo pockets! I was SWEATING.

My colleague Christopher Spata chimed in with something I'd never even considered: the idea of giving up.

"This is why I've made the difficult but empowering choice of opting out of jeans," he said. "The garment that is supposed to be the most casual is with each passing cycle more a high-wire act of 'pulling it off'."

He pointed to a 2021 Dave Schilling piece in the Los Angeles Times, positioning denim as a time capsule, a marker of personality and social station. Schilling found Northeast LA residents who won't give up skinny jeans and other "accoutrements of the bygone Obama era."

"Maybe that's why I haven't bothered with jeans in so long," he writes. "They're too tied up in generational angst. The minute I commit to a pair, I've committed to an idea."

That feels true, and because it feels true, it stings. Who are we now? Who am I? After living through a pandemic, after changing nearly everything about my routine and how I live, how do I want to look and dress? Is comfort and practicality more important than a pretense of being alluring? And just who am I luring, anyway? My dog loves me as I am.

Maybe the boyfriend jeans are a form of opting out, in the end. Maybe the younger generation has found a way to express a casual point of view without oversexualizing everything, without sacrificing comfort, without needing three friends to extract them from pants at the night's end.

Yeah! Good theory! Back to Old Navy we go. The boyfriend jeans fit, no shoestring needed. Still comfortable! Still ugly! I added a black and white cropped flannel shirt, because flannels are in style for fall along with their 1990s brethren, cursed button-fly jeans.

I appeared... spoiler alert for the "Dexter" series finale from 2013... I looked like a woodsman. I looked like Dexter after he fakes his death and vanishes to a snowy hill in Oregon. These two items must never be worn together, no matter how much TikTok tells me otherwise.

Still, I liked both pieces separately, so I got them. I will figure it out. And I picked up a pair of Mid-Rise Power Slim Straight jeans, which the sign billed as a cross between a skinny and straight leg. This sign was specifically for me, folks. This sign was for 39-year-olds staring down a vibe shift and looking back wistfully toward Tara Reid, toward a party for Belvedere vodka, toward a swag bag with a Nokia flip phone inside.

Compromise? No time like now. Nix on the button fly, though. On that, I'm standing firm.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on Twitter or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: 652234 at Pixabay