Inside Judi Rosen’s Nolita denim boutique is a mustard-yellow orb that sits with a satisfying weight in your palm, like an oversized 1-ball. Grafted onto its side is a small reflecting glass that you hold at shoulder level. This is the “butt mirror.” There you are, posing like Maleficent clutching a poisoned apple, with your back to a larger, full-length mirror. This double-reflection technique is familiar from any hairdresser’s, but in Rosen’s tiny dollop of a shop, on Elizabeth Street, which she opened earlier this year, this simple act of hindsight feels oddly illicit. We are not often asked to gaze upon our own full moons and assess their waxing dimensions. The human head never quite evolved to turn that way. The view can be a shock—not necessarily unpleasant, but uncanny. Evaluating your own backside, you feel both recognition and remoteness, as if meeting a distant cousin at a compulsory family gathering.
Rosen, who is forty-nine years old but has the spritely affect and bubbly drawl of an N.Y.U. undergrad, put the butt mirror into my hand on a recent October afternoon because she wanted to prove a point. Her point is that super-high-waisted jeans—a cut that Rosen first began pushing in the early two-thousands, when she owned a cult-popular downtown shop called the Good the Bad & the Ugly—make everyone’s rump look rounded and Rubenesque. I had just wriggled, with great effort, into a pair of her wide-legged stovepipe jeans, which have a thirteen-inch rise and come up past my sternum. Rosen’s jeans are meant to fit snugly, or, as she put it,“like a sausage.” Each pair comes with a tiny fabric flap printed with detailed instructions for getting them on: first, yank the pants over the derriere, then fasten the button, then hike them up another two inches, then zip. While I was in the dressing room grunting my way through these four steps, Rosen called out to ask if I was sweating yet. I told her I was considering lying down on the ground to get the zipper up; Rosen told me I would be far from the first customer to do so.
Sourse: newyorker.com
