You know that thing where your pant leg droops down a little bit below the heal, and the bottoms of your pants begin to fray? Do you hate that? There are any number of straps, clasps, and ways to deal with this. You could roll up the bottoms a bit (meh), revel in the rippy fashion (bleh), move to a warmer climate and switch to all shorts; You could even carefully shop as to buy pants that are exactly the right length- though there is a fine line between “high-waters” and the prefect bunched up look.

Or you could:

Late last year I was about to enter the NYC subway station at the corner of 42nd Street and 6th Avenue (Bryant Park). I remembered there was a decent dollar slice (of pizza) place a block south after 41st so instead I continued my stroll. That’s when I saw a guy walking with thumbtacks stuck in the backs of his shoes, keeping the bottoms of his pants bunched so they didn’t touch ground. He happened to go to that dollar slice place as well, where I was able to confirm that the thumbtacks were in fact serving the purpose of pant leg protection. I wasn’t going to further bug this fellow to get a sketchy poorly lit picture of his ingenuity, so I recreated his method in the Popdiatry photo lab.

I applaud this man’s thrifty, novel way to combat what I call fraying-pant-leg-condition. With all the custom spikes I’ve seen sticking out of footwear lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if this evolved into a hot trend some day.