In Search of the ‘Old Man’s Section’

I went to the mall for a pair of pants.

This won’t strike women as a big deal. To them, going to the mall for pants is as ho-hum as going to the kitchen for orange juice. Some even enjoy it.

But men see it altogether differently. “Poor guy!” a man will think on hearing that his friend went to the mall to buy pants. “Pants. The mall. A tough way to go. . . .”

Buying pants is a waste of a Saturday afternoon. Pants are made for men who look more like Stan Laurel than Oliver Hardy. Regardless of your build, you still feel like big, fat Ollie after digging through stacks of chinos with quarterback waists and high-jumper legs. When you finally find your size, the pants never feel right, but you tell your wife: “Sure, they’re great, they’re fine, they’re perfect, let’s get out of here.”

It doesn’t matter; no pants can fit like the ones you wore out, and, whatever you wear, you look more like your high school social studies teacher every day anyway.

That’s why I was pleased to hear that Abercrombie & Fitch had opened at the Pacific View mall.

When I was growing up in New York, I saw the ads for Abercrombie & Fitch. It was called, in the day’s pre-feminist naivete, a “men’s” store. But it was more than that: It was a place you could buy 10-pound hiking boots, a handsome leather pouch for your snakebite kit, a javelin to practice hurling up at your summer place. Abercrombie & Fitch outfitted Theodore Roosevelt for hunting grizzlies out West. At Abercrombie & Fitch, sharp-looking men could find a jacket ideal both for a medical mission to Ethiopia and the 4:47 to Connecticut.

But as soon as I strolled into Ventura’s Abercrombie & Fitch, I realized I couldn’t buy pants there. Huge wall posters featured shirtless, 20-year-old guys with sculpted bodies and chins as square as silicon chips. Fashionably wrinkled, torn-off khaki shorts were piled on the tables. The pants on the rack were baggy enough to clothe entire families in India and had a hundred pockets for water bottles, floppy discs, Cliffs notes, business plans.

“Where’s the old man’s section?” I shouted to a “brand representative” above rock music loud enough to split small mammals in two.

“We don’t have one,” he shouted back. “We cater to, like, college students.”

“Well, where does a 52-year-old guy go to get cool clothes?”

He wrinkled his brow, as if he’d been asked to compare and contrast the first and second Punic wars.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never run up against that.”

Abercrombie & Fitch, I later learned, reinvented itself eight years ago. Its old appeal had faded. The javelins were rusting on the shelf. Now it’s hip, fresh, trendy, and young, young, young.

When you’re looking for pants at the mall, it’s tough not to feel old, old, old.

Aside from the big department stores and a place that sells loungers, the mall doesn’t do middle age very well.

You don’t see gangs of disaffected 50-year-olds meandering through, checking each other out over their bifocals. You don’t see bald guys and gray-flecked ladies in post-corn dog clinches over by the couches.

What you see are kids, and more kids, and the stores that sell them their teeny tank tops, glittery earrings, pink leopard-skin diaries, signature sneakers, on and on, world without end.

I went to the mall for a pair of pants, but I didn’t buy any.

One day soon, I’ll be back--not to Abercrombie & Fitch, but to the place my high school social studies teacher probably bought his pants, as well as his father before him.

See you at Sears, guys.

Happy Father’s Day.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 6453-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.