
The balloon kept getting bigger. Looking for signs of the times, pants-wise, I noticed that the influential and idiosyncratically stylish rapper Tyler, the Creator – once seen only in skinny jeans and cut-off shorts – had adopted baggy pants. In 2019, pop star Harry Styles began exploring a flowing style that included widely flared sailor pants (and, for a Vogue cover photoshoot, a big, ruffled dress). In February 2021, fashion critic Rachel Tashjian tweeted an Oscars photo of Danish film editor Mikkel EG Nielsen in pants whose tent-like expanse could have accommodated two of him. “Folks, this is a ***pants*** story unfolding before our eyes,” she said. “After years of tiny, overly fitted pants, BIG TROUSERS are returning to the red carpet.” At subsequent awards ceremonies, LaKeith Stanfield, Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne were among those who followed in Nielsen’s extravagant footsteps.
In late 2022, J. Crew – that historic paragon of right-thinking traditional sartorialism – released a gargantuan new pair of flat-front chinos. They had a vast and blocky climb. The hems had circumferences the size of dinner plates. J. Crew called them jumbo cut chinos. They were undoubtedly a shock to some casual office types who had long buried themselves in the comfortable, familiar confines of tapered, stretchy pants. But of course, other observers scoffed: these things weren’t even that big.
Throughout the uproar, I looked at a screenshot I had saved to my desktop. It was a 2021 tweet from comedian Noah Garfinkel, who distilled the epistemological vertigo spiraling around pants into an absurdist fashion koan. “No matter what style you think (expletive) is, pants are the pants you’re supposed to wear,” he wrote, “and as soon as they start to feel normal, they’re not the right ones anymore pants. You should always wear pants that look stupid on you.
To say what it is Obviously, I really care about pants. I’m tempted to say I care too much, because we often dismiss our preoccupation with clothing as vain, frivolous, and otherwise regrettable. It can definitely be that sort of thing. But I try to make sense of it as a constant fascination with the beautiful, funny, charged workings of a visual language that we all speak all the time, deftly or clumsily, consciously or not. It’s a language with heightened stakes because, unless you count nudists and hermits, there’s no way to refuse to speak it – not to mention that it can be extremely difficult to know when a particular phrase was born in you and when the words you What you speak were put into your mouth by the industry puppeteers from above.
In 2020, I started writing a style and culture newsletter called Blackbird Spyplane. Perhaps the most common question from readers concerned about – you guessed it – pants. Specifically, How should they adapt now? Indeed, among clothing, pants possess a unique and particularly vexing signifying power: no other item of clothing that we wear regularly is as totemic, as eloquent, or as problematic. A friend of mine concerned about pants, Wall Street Journal fashion writer Jacob Gallagher, called pants «the heart of an outfit.» GQ fashion writer Samuel Hine — a devoted Talmudist about pants — recently described them to me as «the most essential item of clothing you can wear.» Even those of us who have no stated interest in fashion are prone to feeling anxiety, vulnerability, and dissatisfaction with our pants. Larry David once said that «trying on pants is one of the most humiliating things a man can do.» In a 2021 interview, David Lynch – a master of the fear that lurks beneath the surface of the everyday – confessed: “I’m looking for good pants. I’ve never found a pair of pants I love,» adding, «If they don’t fit, which they never do, it’s a shame.»