Why Is Everyone Freaking Out About Pants?

Earlier this week, a friend texted me: “Why are people talking about pants as if there have never been pants before?” (She asked to be identified as “an anonymous woman who has known about pants for years.”)

It was true: my friend had committed a mortal sin—logging on—and discovered that the timeline was absolutely flooded with pants news. It began last week, when Harry Styles shared the cover of his upcoming album, a fish-eye shot of the singer disco-dancing in a pair of Gucci wide-leg sailor trousers, photographed by the great glossy-surrealist fashion photographer Tim Walker. This week, there was Rachel Syme’s ode to the high-waisted jeans on the New Yorker’s website, which drove a legion of women to rhapsodize about their own experiences with high-waisted jeans and their alleged butt-enhancement qualities. “If your high-waisted pants aren’t giving you a wedgie or a yeast infection, are they too low-cut?” tweeted...the New Yorker. (To be fair, the pants worn by man who inspired New Yorker mascot Eustace Tilley give Styles a run for his money.) Bringing the pants craze to a fever pitch was the release of another fish-eye Walker image of Styles, reclined in a pose that exaggerated his pant legs into two huge whales. They looked totally outrageous. Skinny jeans haven’t been the default silhouette for a few years now, but it felt like Styles was throwing down the gauntlet. You thought my pants were big from that angle? Check them out from the ground!

Suddenly, everyone was a pants expert, observing pant trends, advancing pant conspiracies, celebrating pant-forward outfits, issuing warnings against those who are wearing the wrong pants, and in some cases, simply purporting to know about pants.

To answer my friend’s question: people are freaking out about pants because pants are the final frontier in directional fashion. In this anything-goes era that privileges micro-trends—neon one month and Raf Simons-inspired graphics the next—and personal style over sweeping ideaslike hem lengths and silhouettes, pants are the only thing that can divide or unite an audience. This is, in part, practical: pants are probably the most utilitarian part of an outfit. Like, I guess you could say that legally, you have to wear pants. You don’t need a sweater, or a jacket, or even a crossbody bag (I know!), the way you need pants. Any tweak to a pant, therefore, feels more radical than messing with proportions or color on a jacket, or a sweater, or socks. Take a look at the e-commerce platform of your choice. The weirdest (and in my humble opinion, best) stuff: all pants.

Of course there are outliers—the Vuitton harnesses, for example, felt revolution-adjacent, but harnesses were an invention rather than an evolution of a previously recognized form. (An invention by Helmut Lang, by the way, who seems to be responsible for every workwear-adjacent trend that designers from Virgil Abloh to Demna Gvasalia have revived over the past five years.) Again: you don’t need a harness like you need pants. And much wilder than Timothée Chalamet’s harness? His unrelenting commitment to an unusual, Haider Ackerman-inspired style of tucking in your pants.

Like everything else in clothes today, there is no “correct” pant. The pants that started kickstarted the high-waisted jeans trend in 2015, Rachel Comey’s Legion Jeans, didn’t lead to a ritual dismissal of every other kind of jean, as trends once did, but rather a wave of relief for wealthy Brooklyn matriarchs, who seem to wear those jeans, or some take on them, exclusively. Gone are the days when Hedi Slimane could hand down a skinny jean mandate. But pants, which involve a level of commitment, a kind of daring, that no other article of clothing can match, are nonetheless the final frontier in directional fashion. Think about Flea’s stuffed animal pants, also known as the #1 Pants of All Time. Flea would’ve just been a guy with a weird thing for stuffed animals if the piece had just been a sweatshirt. But as pants? They made Flea an icon.