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“Buying jeans is a big deal, and you have to be patient,” explains Scottie, the blonde and both pretty and understated female owner of Blues 
Jean Bar. “It can be like buying a bathing suit.”
Personally, I like jeans shopping about as much as I like bathing suit shopping, which is about as much as I would like to get my wisdom teeth pulled.
Alas, all are inevitable, so I found myself on a mission for the perfect pair of jeans at Blues Jean Bar in Lincoln Park one dreary Saturday afternoon.
There is nothing subtle about the store’s running joke with its name. At its entrance, customers face a counter — or a bar, if you will — stretching the entire length of the store covered in neat stacks of jeans upon jeans upon jeans. A chalkboard to the immediate right reads, “Denim on Tap,” and the impressive list of brands in stock, all 25, follows (Seven, True Religion, Hudson, 525, etc.).
The “jeans bartender” lingers behind the counter, greeting customers as if they were regulars at a neighborhood pub.
“Welcome to Blues Jean Bar!” an all-smiles, jeans-adorned saleswoman says as she guides me through the routine. All the styles carried are on the counter in a size 29. What am I looking for? Overwhelmed with the overflowing supply of denim — sequined jeans, studded jeans, ripped jeans, bleached jeans, corduroy jeans, embroidered jeans, even plain old jeans — I manage only to answer, “I just need ... new jeans.”
With patience, she poses Blues Jean Bar’s profound fundamental, philosophical question: “What do you look for, in a jean?” Since I have no idea, she decides to “start me out with a couple,” or upwards of a dozen, pairs.
The dressing room area shows me that no detail escapes the Blues Jean Bar people. Plush, warm-toned leather couches surround a coffee table as stacked with US Weeklys as the counter with its jeans, perfect means to spark the overheard intense debate about Nicole Richie’s eating disorder, or lack thereof: “There was like, five seconds when she was perfect,” an employee asserts.
They just get it here (jeans shopping, not Nicole Richie’s eating habits). Buying new jeans is a daunting, sensitive affair, exposing the vulnerabilities — and flat butts, big thighs, you name it — of all of us. A jeans store that gets it has mirrors inside the dressing room for customer privacy. Couches nearby for patient friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, whomever. Salespeople who give their customers space. And fascinating reading material for all.
The price tags are a bit less friendly. Thousands of dollars worth of denim sit in my dressing room alone, not a pair of jeans under $160. For investigative journalism’s sake, I start to try them on. I secretly appreciate the consideration of mirrors inside, not just outside, the dressing room, and make my way out only in the pairs I can button closed.
Apparently, I have the right idea, as my helper informs me: “Our motto is, if you can button them, they fit.”
Thinking about my fellow college students just managing to zipper themselves into their high school jeans, promising themselves they shrunk in the dryer, makes me secretly question the validity of the motto. I give her a polite smile.
As a former retail employee myself, at a pricey jeans store no less, I am smug and skeptical of sales help. I would “Those look great on you” 
the customers till I was blue in the face, so my doubt was understandably knee-jerk in response to my friendly helper’s “I adore my Tag’s. … Those look great on you.”
When I came out in a grayish pair of Hudson’s, however, her quick, “Oh, I don’t like those,” let me know this is someone I can trust. And that, agrees Scottie, is what is most important at her store. When asked why a customer chooses to come here instead of a department store with an equally hefty jeans supply, she replies, “We give a lot of attention. Our customers cannot get a pair without talking to a jeans bartender first.”
Quite a few pairs in, however, I am still unsuccessful, even with the help and understanding of my patient bartender. The dressing room is starting to look like my dorm room — an indistinguishable mess. My hope for that one special pair begins to diminish when suddenly, a pair of light 575’s falls from the pile to my feet. Fate. Praying quietly to myself, I pull on the itty-bitty pair and, yes, close them. I can’t wait to hear what the bartender has to say. I emerge from the dressing room imagining my oh-so-perfect pair positively sparkling.
“Oooh, I like those,” she says. I’m like a kid in a candy shop. “Those are really new. You’re not going to see everyone wearing them,” she informs me. I hardly hear her as I drink them in through the reflection of the store’s full-length mirror. No hiding in the dressing room with these. They’re soft but not too stretchy, light but not bleached, distressed but not falling apart at the seams, tight but … okay, really tight.
“I love them,” I exclaim. I am sad to take them off. I am sold. Not only are my jeans beyond my college-budget means, but on the entire concept, the Blues Jean Bar philosophy.
“We are a really hip, fashion conscious boutique,” Scottie tells me. “We give great customer service. We want this to be fun and effortless. We want everyone to leave looking awesome and feeling really good.”