Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?

At some point in the past few years, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about, everyone’s pants started to look wrong. For an improbably long time, the “right” pants — meaning those that conveyed some socially agreed-upon, base-line level of stylishness — had been, in a word, small. Snug through the thighs, throttled at the knees, close-cut at the calves, on intimate terms with the ankles. Running a minuscule gamut from skinny to the slightly-more-accommodating slim. There were exceptions, particularly when it came to women’s pants. But on balance, fitted was the way good pants were supposed to fit.

My pants had been slim for some 15 years, since so-called skinny jeans first hit the market in earnest, around 2005. Narrow silhouettes quickly spread, until they felt less like a trend and more like a structural fact of existence: A decade after their ascendance, slim-fit pants remained common currency across generations, demographics and body types. BTS, at the time the biggest pop group in the world, wore them. Underground Chicago drill rappers wore them, too. Hollywood leading men and neighborhood baristas, wedding planners and basketball players, morning-show hosts and accountants, youth pastors and construction workers, your nephew and your aunt. You might have wondered if we’d reached the End of Pants.

And then, in a rupture whose center I place within the broader pandemic-era upheavals of 2020, the “right” pants began to lurch away from the leg at scale. Jeans, a kind of Patient Zero for pants trends, showed symptoms of acute-onset elephantiasis. Stylish friends of mine and strangers whose outfits I ogled online abandoned their slim-fit denim for straight-leg vintage Levi’s 501s — something like the Greenwich Mean Time of modern pants — and then swiftly abandoned those for ever-ampler models. Paul O’Neill, the global design director for Levi’s, told me that in recent years he noticed a rise in kids hitting “thrift stores to buy jeans with a Size 46 or 48 waist and belting them, to get that oversize look.” He’d made some of the company’s baggiest-ever pants in response, and even baggier ones were in the works.

Month by month, pants got puffier, growing higher rises and sprouting more and more pleats. Hemlines that once severely tapered now expanded, hovering like U.F.O.s above shoes or pooling atop them like swirls of soft-serve ice cream. On Instagram, fashion mood-board accounts, which aggregate “aspirational” imagery, did an increasingly brisk trade in photographs from the late ’80s and early ’90s of people wearing billowing trousers by Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and Yohji Yamamoto.

All manner of pants polarities rapidly inverted themselves. Perhaps the most epochal illustration concerned, of all people, Barack Obama. In 2009, he threw the first pitch at the All-Star Game wearing shapeless, wide-leg Levi’s — ur-uncool “dad jeans,” at the time. They inspired widespread ridicule, because the way pants fit is a kind of lingua franca: Even people who claim not to care at all about clothes feel qualified to judge. A decade later, though, those kinds of dad jeans were looking better than ever, and here were photos of Obama pushing 60 in far-too-tight, far-too-cropped chinos during a visit to Kuala Lumpur. Looking at these pictures side by side, we had incontrovertible proof: Skinny pants were the real dad pants now. You might still be wearing them, but they were no longer “right".

In some ways, this shift felt entirely predictable, as if a rubber band stretched tight had snapped back to laxity. And yet it was disconcerting too, as if the rubber band had immediately become a balloon. It could be hard to trust your own eyes. I’d been feeling the rumblings of a Return to Big Pants since about 2017, when I remember worrying about the fact that I was 36 and still wearing essentially the same pants I’d worn at 26. There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself — the balding guy still trying to make his high school haircut work. I made the conscious decision to resist fossilization and buy roomier pants, and over the next couple of years, I thought that’s what I did. My wife and my friends tell me they thought I did, too, having seen some of the new pants in question and deemed them conspicuously, if not laughably, large. And yet photographs confirm that, in absolute terms, my pants remained fitted for a while. I couldn’t see it clearly at first, but I was locked in an arms race against my own mounting pants dysmorphia. Trousers that struck me as audaciously large yesterday looked correct today. By tomorrow I would wonder if they weren’t actually a bit close-clinging. (...)

In strictly physical terms, no article of clothing does more to articulate and augment the line of our bodies — to beautify us or deform us — than pants. They tend to occupy the most visual square footage in any given outfit. They also tend to move more than other clothes as our bodies move through the world, which creates more inflection points where they can attract notice — and where they can go wrong. “A T-shirt is so much simpler,” Hine said. “A sweater is so much simpler. Even with a button-up, you can fake it: roll up the sleeves, unbutton the neck.” But “there’s no place to hide in a bad-fitting pair of pants.

“Pants are diabolical as design objects,” Hine went on. “You can look at the measurements for the waist and the inseam, but that won’t tell you anything besides how they fit in two places, when there’s so many other variables — the rise, the hemline, fabric weight, drape. It’s an object that throughout history was made by tailors and craftsmen, and when it got mass-produced and casualized, what happened was they took this really intricate garment and tried to tell us, ‘Everyone can wear this every day, and it’ll be easy to find a pair that makes sense for your body’ — but it’s actually an enormous challenge.”

It’s a challenge whether you’re a self-identifying clotheshorse or someone who simply doesn’t want to look comically out of touch, like Obama on the pitcher’s mound. This is a big part of why trends around the “right” pants tend to move so slowly. Once you find a style you like — or once you acquiesce to the style you’re supposed to like and then hope your perception adjusts accordingly — it’s reasonable to want to drop anchor.

That was particularly true with a style as extreme as slim pants, which required a leap of faith for lots of people to accept in the first place. Skinny silhouettes were, in hindsight, a highly unlikely proposition for mass adoption: not just physically constrictive but also revealing to a degree that could verge on a violation of privacy. And yet, in short order, the ultraslim look flowed outward from tip-of-the-spear European jeans makers like Cheap Monday and A.P.C. to “elevated” mall brands like J. Crew. Influential designer labels like Band of Outsiders and Dior Homme made slim-fit synonymous with a chic, faintly roguish urbanity, and Thom Browne went one further, cutting trousers not just tight but also high, positing the exposed male ankle as its own sort of statement accessory. Fast-fashion chains like Zara and H&M peddled unisex pantomimes of these skinny upmarket styles, and before long, so did mass-retail behemoths like Old Navy and Target, signaling and consolidating small pants’ grip on the zeitgeist. (...)

Of course, word of the king’s death hasn’t reached everyone yet. Saager Dilawri, a very stylish man who owns one of my favorite clothing shops, the Vancouver-based Neighbour, told me that, over the holidays, he got a drink with some guys he plays hockey with. “I was wearing loose jeans, and everyone was wearing slim pants — maybe too slim,” Dilawri recalled. “And one of them came up to me and said: ‘Back in the day we all wore loose pants, then we were told, “Slim pants are cool,” so now we’re all wearing slim pants. You’re the only one here wearing loose pants. Are the trends changing again?’”

If, in 2024, pants feel unsettled, it’s not only because the consensus around the “right” pants has whipped so precipitously from small to big but also because, at the very same time, a more fundamentally nagging question has started to creep up: Is there actually anything resembling consensus around trends anymore? (...)

The pandemic accelerated many trends in the virtualization of life; assembling outfits as much for your digital self as for the one who moves through the physical world is one of them. Against that backdrop, it feels like no coincidence that the extreme of skinny pants gave way so rapidly to the extreme of big pants: This has been a moment in fashion characterized by extremes more than anything, because extremes are what play best on phone screens. We see this in recent vogues for eye-popping graphic tees, for viral novelty footwear like the Big Red Boots and for so-called haul videos, where the point is to flaunt a staggering volume of new acquisitions. We also see it, less intuitively, in the countervailing vogue for “quiet luxury,” a style of dressing that is putatively about tasteful restraint — no logos, no garish, déclassé patterns — but in actual practice is deafening in its emphasis on soft, pampering fabrics, excessive volumes, sumptuous hues and, never far from mind, astronomical pricing.

Where fashion and technology converge is in their mutual dependence on novelty and obsolescence — products need to phase out so that different products can phase in — and the current swing to big pants might prove nothing more than a brief overcorrection after the long reign of small ones. There are some reasons to be bullish about the chances of mainstream big-pants hegemony. J. Crew now offers the giant-fit chino in a range of colors, and Madewell, whose customer is similar, recently relaunched its men’s line with a bunch of wide and baggy pants styles. In 2022, Levi’s rolled out a reissue of its infamously wide ’90s-era SilverTab jeans with Kohl’s, as mass-market a retailer as you can imagine. And yet, some people think skinny is bound to make a swift comeback — slim pants were surprisingly well-represented on designer runways in January — and I’m already seeing an uptick in Y2K-style ultra-low-rise flares. If the internet hasn’t broken the pants pendulum, where is the pendulum right now, exactly?

by Jonah Weiner, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Bobby Doherty for The New York Times: Sloan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Bryan Cranston for Kith via; and via.

[ed. About time. Skinny pants look ridiculous; and super baggy ones do too (remember the 80s Miami Vice craze and M.C. Hammer?). Maybe that's why sweat and yoga pants and leggings are so popular. Different looks for different occasions, just save the big bucks for quality items that never go out of style. See also: Levi’s Wants You to Rethink Your Denim Shopping (NYT).]