Monday, March 1, 1999 | 11:36 a.m.
Levi's are no longer cool.
This is news to me. This is news to you. This is news to the thousands of Levi Strauss & Co. factory workers being laid off across the country.
Apparently, this is not news to 15-year-olds. That's because they're the ones who stopped buying the jeans from the century-old company. In a recent poll, only 7 percent of teens said they considered Levi's to be "cool."
What I want to know is: Who are these upstarts to destroy an American icon? I say we get 'em.
I have to admit, I don't like this so-called upstart Generation Y crop of kids because, well, they make me feel so darn old.
Like an older woman sensing that her husband is about to dump her for a fresh new trophy bride, I can tell that marketers are already plotting to push aside us Gen-Xers in favor of the Next Generation.
Which means all those savvy Gen-X marketers and advocacy groups and spokespeople and other con artists who've pieced together a living off the Gen-X mystique (yes, even yours truly) are about to be smack out of a job.
Already, this cohort of 5- to 20-year-olds is taking over. Last week, Business Week magazine slapped "Generation Y" on its cover, noting that there's 60 million of them to 17 million of us.
I say we get 'em, anyway.
Already, I sense a groundswell of resentment.
An e-mail that occasionally circulates among my peers describes the current crop of college freshmen and details all their lapses in knowledge. The list is endless: According to the anonymous author, this is the generation that can only remember one pope, one president and one host of the "Tonight Show" -- Jay Leno. They can't remember when the space shuttle blew up and don't remember the Cold War. They've never heard of polio, Pan-Am, or Beta. They've never owned a record player; have never seen a black and white TV.
Most egregious: They haven't heard the phrases "Where's the beef?" or "de plane, de plane." And they don't care who shot J.R.
Blasphemy. It's almost too easy to pick on them. Thankfully, most of them are still pretty short. And they're too young to have their own columns attacking me back.
That's not to say I haven't tried relating to the Y-ers: I've gone snowboarding; it only gave me a sore rump. I have yet to correctly use the term "jonesing" in a sentence. I've got only a vague notion of what it means to "get jiggy."
I flip through Spin every month, but sometimes it's so foreign to me, I might as well be reading El Mundo. I thumb through it, griping old fogey-like, how "I just don't get this body piercing/tatooing/branding/skull-drilling (trepanation) fad."
Even though I'm the 1982 Catskill Mountains Ms. Pacman Champion, (girls 10-13 division, thank you very much), I can't figure out how to work these newfangled arcade shoot-'em-up games, so I retreat to GameWorks, where they still offer a few holdouts from a kinder, gentler era, such as Space Invaders and Asteroids.
I say it's time to rebel.
I say, in a sign of solidarity, tomorrow we all wear our oldest pair of Levi's. If you still have a jean jacket kicking around your closet, (and you know you do) throw that on, too.
I say: Generation X unite. Don't go quietly into that good night. Rage, rage, against this Generation Lite.
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