its best to buy "nice" jeans at a good price. you can pay crap for crap jeans. or you can pay crap for nice jeans. your choice. in my opinion its not cool to wear some really girly type jeans with a bunch of holes/rips/stains/fades in them. but it aint too cool either to be rocking some old navy/arizona/ wrangler stuff either. but if you feel like having something that fits decent and something that will wear out in half the time at half the price then go for it.
I love Levi's. The only pair of jeans I actually wear I got from American Eagle a year or two ago. I only wash 'em about once ever week or two. I never wash jeans. Whatever. They fit better that way. Edit: My favorit-est jeans ever were Girbauds way back in the day. Those were comfortable as hell. I never washed them, either.