Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Get ready, America. A famous pant is trudging up the comeback trail.

RN: If you're about to invoke the word "stirrup," I am so out of here.

CP: Dockers, the ubiquitous khaki slack of 1990s, is about to get an image makeover. Mission impossible?

RN: More like, mission why bother?

CP: Come on, Rick, admit it. When you were finishing up your MBA and had to look nice on a dime, you had a closet full of those modestly priced, stylishly neutral man-pants.

RN: That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me, not to mention a flat-out lie.

CP: The brand has some heavy lifting to do. It's like trying to "refresh" Dick Cheney's image. But let's not underestimate the power of a $20 million global ad campaign by Levi Strauss & Co., which sells Dockers. We'll be seeing plenty of those "Wear the Pants"-themed ads cropping up during the holidays and the Super Bowl.

RN: Another reason why I don't watch football. As a part of its campaign to make the Dockers label hot again -- although, really, was it ever? -- the company is employing what it describes as "witticisms," such as "Khaki Diem," "Mansformation" and "Manthropomorphism." They sound like slow-day blog posts from the boys at projectrungay.blogspot.com.

CP: The new "Go Forth" commercials for Levi's jeans are some of the best I've seen, with their post-Obama youth holding torches aloft, regarding waterfalls, tromping through woods and fields as a voiceover intones parts of a thrilling poem by Walt Whitman. Something tells me the great gray-bearded gay bard would love this gorgeous, even stirring, campaign.

RN: Sure, save the good stuff for Levi's. Then again, Levi's has always been effortlessly cool and proletariat, which is not easy to pull off. Remember their trippy TV ads in the 1970s? Someone was smoking something in San Francisco.

CP: I'd better go forth and buy a pair of Levi's right now. No wait. I checked last night, and I already own 13 pairs. That's nearly half of my total jeans inventory. I blame the marketers.

RN: That's funny, I blame your shopping gene. I will admit that I'm a tiny -- emphasis on tiny -- bit curious to see the newer, more streamlined Dockers, as well as the so-called K1 pant, which they're saying is based upon 1940s military officers' trousers. Coming soon to a Kohl's near you, right?

CP: That's the spirit. If Dockers does a capri length for spring/summer, I'm there.

E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com.

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