WHAT WE’RE WEARING VOL. 11: A LIFELONG DENIMHEAD MAKES A CHANGE

Denim runs in Karen Riley-Grant’s blood. Her dad was a fashionable man, and she still has 517s and double-pleated Dockers from the ’80s that he used to wear. It’s easy to understand, then, why the marketing VP stole her roommate’s 501® jeans in college, and why she’s amassed two decades of denim since. Now, the mother of three is rethinking her style, and how to be more sustainable. This, in her own words, is what she’s wearing.

I’m in Singapore. A year and a half ago, my family moved here from San Francisco so I could head up marketing in the Asia, Middle East, and Africa regions. It’s a big shift. We’ve got three kids. But Singapore’s the Chicago of Asia, location-wise, so we’ve been traveling all over Asia, and we just love it.

We’ve been living with COVID since the third week of January. We had to adjust to a new way of living. The rigidness took a minute for our feral children to get used to. We had to send them off for temperature checks and screening checks. The tightening up was really hard. And as the world’s gotten worse, we’ve buckled down even more.

We do try to bring some level of structure to the day. We have to. Even when we realized we’d be stuck inside, I told everyone, “Ok, you need to wear pants.”

Dressing for work has always started with my jeans first. I like to think my style is effortless. I don’t put a lot of time into getting dressed, because I don’t have a lot of time. But I do want to wear something unique. I rarely keep clothes the way they come off the rack. I always have to do something to them.

These 501® jeans with the holes are my favorite — I’ve had them since my freshman year of college. I stole them from my roommate. Actually, my four roommates all wore them. Senior year, I hid them and got away with them. I wore them less for a while, because the fits that were in style got really low. But the 501® is definitely back now.

I think 721s are the perfect fit. I give them as gifts to friends. I dress a lot of high/low — maybe shredded jeans and something fancy on top, or vice versa. But I don’t wear a lot of color, and I keep it pretty simple. I’m not super disco.

I’ve got two decades worth of jeans. Jen Sey, our Chief Marketing Officer, challenged us all at Levi’s® to reduce our wear while we’re stuck inside. So I have one pair of 501® shorts that I wear every day now, and I have a lot of time to think. You see what has happened to the environment, in a good way, since the COVID crisis. And then you look in a closet full of denim, and you say, “This is crazy.”