The Tao of Denim: If It's Not Worn, You Have Nothing On

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Denim was sober and utilitarian, a thing of the 19th century, a tough fabric for tough men, meant to be worn lots and worn down.

Now it is worn down by our own fussiness. It is washed, sandblasted, hand-sanded, treated with resin. Mauro owns jeans that came with the outline of a chewing-tobacco tin already etched into the back pocket, like ready-made manhood. He's wearing them when a tough-looking man comes out of a Denim Bar dressing room looking gleeful.

"They're hugging my buns!" the man says.

The buns are the anchor of the premium-denim world, and not just because a good pair of jeans will make them look fabulous. ("Like cherries," one fit model has said. "We don't want any muffin tops," Mauro says mysteriously.)

The backside of a pair of jeans broadcasts your status, and hard-core denimheads will instantly recognize the meaning of each obscure squiggle stitched into a back pocket. It's a tribal marking. It tells you if the owner is wearing a pair of 7 for All Mankind jeans, signaling that she may be mainstream, a girl who follows her friends. It tells you if she's wearing Paige jeans, suggesting she reads InStyle religiously and emulates Jennifer Aniston. Or she may flaunt the hand-painted logo of Evisu jeans, meaning she paid, oh, $520 for them. This signals that she's loaded.

Mary Alexandre, a part-owner of the Denim Bar, pulls out a pair of the Evisu. They're a pretty medium blue and incredibly soft, but aside from the back-pocket squiggles, there's little to distinguish them to the untrained eye.

"They're fun, they're different," Mary says earnestly. She doesn't have Mauro's retail experience but does have a natural talent for clothes. (Mauro calls her a "hard-core shopper.")

Mary, an attractive blonde, and the two attractive blond saleswomen who work here have perfected that expensive, casual look that is so popular these days, when celebrities wear jeans even on the red carpet. This look is epitomized by the crisp, perfectly fitting plain T-shirt with crisp, perfectly fitting jeans. (Crisp even when purposely wrinkled.)

Mauro and Mary sell little aside from jeans, but what they do sell appears carefully selected to follow this aesthetic, at once pricey and understated. There's a thin white undershirt decorated with what looks like turquoise beads, selling for $212, and a belt with a carved onyx buckle that might (to a know-nothing) appear to be plastic, priced at $440.

This is the epitome of looking good without looking like you're trying. It's an insider's club; only fellow denimheads will know how much you've spent to look ordinary.

There is also a denim skirt that is significantly wider than it is long. If you push the waist down to the pelvic bones, the skirt barely reaches mid-thigh, assuming you don't bend or sit. It sells for $146, and lives out on the floor with the lesser-priced jeans; pairs that cost $250 and up are kept behind the bar, where the vodka should be.