mood indigo; The skinny jean is a tricky little trend: difficult to wear, almost impossible to ignore.

Byline: Jane Herman

At an early Sunday dinner in Los Angeles last March, my family and I were engaged in a particularly fiery debate. The subject: skinny jeans.

My youngest sister, Kimberly, was convinced. "I have to wear them, but I'm over it," she said. She had on J Brand's latest ten-inch peg-legs, totally new and the skinniest of all; any tighter around the ankles and she would have to detach her feet to put them on. For Kim, who's 20 years old and a student at USC, keeping things interesting meant going to extremes. For my other sister, Chrissy, who's 23, it was all about staying confident. "I feel cooler in my skinny jeans," she said. "It actually seems wrong to wear anything else." In Los Angeles, where Chrissy works in fashion, the skinny was standard six months ago. Meanwhile, I was having my own issue. Despite my size (2) and frame (petite), I was certain that skinny jeans didn't look good on me.

My family objected, and the hailstorm began, with my father insisting that if few women could pull off the look when it was popular back in the late eighties, the same could only be true now. My mother assured us that it would all be over soon. Back and forth, my sisters and I discussed why we were wearing them (they're current), and why we weren't (they're not flattering or comfortable), and why we all

felt we had to (denim trends are peculiarly infectious), until one thing became clear: Regardless of whether or not we felt secure, stylish, sexy, or all of the above in our skinny jeans, the whole thing was making us anxious.

How could it not? In my family, jeans mean business. The story starts with my father, Ron Herman, who naturally distressed his unwashed Levi's in the fifties by wearing them into the ocean before rubbing them down with beach sand. In the seventies he became a retailer and a pioneer of lesser-known European labels like London's Wild Mustang, Spain's Lois, and Italy's Goldie. The world wanted acid wash in the eighties, but he sold finer, more exclusive Chipie jeans. One spring, in '88, he brought me a pair of Chipie's back from Paris. I wore them mainly because no one I knew had a pair. I was eight. Today my parents own a handful of specialty boutiques in and around Los Angeles. The one in the Fred Segal center on Melrose Avenue is home to the original Jean Bar: a mirrored closet of floor-to-ceiling denim that's distinguished from the rest of the store by its low, service-oriented counter. Over the years it's become a veritable flash point for America's obsession with premium-brand blues.

I grew up behind the Jean Bar. It's where my mother used to put me down to sleep while she worked alongside my father on the sales floor. It's where I went for my first pair of real, adult jeans: paper-bag Blue Systems. In college, I worked summers there alongside a brainy, tattooed "bartender" named Keith, who knew the stock list by heart and encouraged me to learn it, too. The Jean Bar is the only place I'd ever go to get my fix. Currently, though, it's also the epicenter of my denim anxiety; eight of its top ten styles are skinny.