Torn Jeans by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal
On this view, one can only accumulate wealth at someone else's expense. Therefore, if you wear untorn clothes, you in effect are condemning someone else to wear rags, for one man's wealth is another man's poverty. Best, then, to side (symbolically at least) with the wretched of the earth by wearing rags. Of course, jeans with pre-torn holes are often pricier than jeans without. No doubt, laborers toil somewhere in the Third World to produce these carefully ripped garments. It is an irony that a taste for symbolic poverty provides employment to people who might have to wear real rags.