NYT - Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?
By Jonah Weiner
The New York Times
Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?
And what the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves.
29 Replies
Trying to not get triggered at some of the reader comments 😂
that second obama fit...bless
While this article is an interesting exploration of the current trends, all of the justifications feel backwards. I don't think theres a true reason they got wider except for that it was a response to skinny pants.
I think justifying trends beyond a response to fashion itself is fruitless for the most part.
Someone in the comments is complaining that most women's jeans are 32" inseam which seems long to me too but you can also like get your jeans hemmed for $15...
I also disagree that baggy pants became popular any faster than skinny pants became popular ~15 years prior. I don't think the shift in trends is actually any different.
Why are you reading NYT comments?
Idk good point lol
perpetually 10 years behind lol
i mean tan suit was rather forward of him
That is true
i think this was written by someone who is still questioning their decision to buy larger pants lol
Its the BBSP author
Same guy who wrote this: https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-too-big-pants
If your pants look "too big," wear even bigger pants
Jawn Dysmorphic Perceptual Shifts, plus sick shoes, the coolest graphic tee to drop in a minute, handmade jeans & more
quiet luxury as an extreme in anything other than pricing...hmm...
Ya all the justifications for trends feel like post-hoc justifications
working backwards to explain a trend which I fundamentally disagree with
sometimes things are popular for no reason beyond a TV show inspiring people and growing out of that, or because its not what was previously popular
the tone is kinda...huh
very 'wear what you want to wear, just know that things can and will arbitrarily change, and even not caring about that doesn't fully stop this from happening'. he's not wrong it's just not the kind of conclusion i'd expect here
I feel like it not only completely fails to answer its own headline (which to be fair, is probably an editor decision) , but also it feels almost like hes just a bit burnt out on fashion (a bit ironic as a fashion journalist)
i get it fashion is annoying, especially for a topic like this where the target audience is like 5 years behind
but also you could just not write 🙂
one of the comments mentioned the thrift -> social media -> trend pipeline and i don't think that was explored enough (at all)
“Whatever style pants look like [expletive] to you are the pants you’re supposed to wear,” he wrote, “and as soon as they start to look normal to you, those are not the right pants anymore. You should always be wearing pants you think look stupid.”
I think a related topic that's interesting is the rise and fall of spandex/elastane in clothing. Elastane seemed to get more and more popular in clothing as fits got skinnier and has been waning as fits go wider.
One one hand, it makes sense that skinnier clothes would add more stretch to compensate for the natural lack of movement. But I think you can just as easily argue that cheaper oil lead to more elastane use and more elastane use made skinnier and skinnier clothes more viable.
It similarly makes sense to say that elastane use waned as pants got wider but you could also say that ther was already a negative sentiment towards synthetics and people graviated to wider fits that didn't require it.
When we try to impose coherent sense onto trends, in all their vast and ungainly workings, we often reach for cyclical metaphors, whereby past styles are understood to loop back around, given enough time, in an endless recurrence.This guy is paid by the word isn't he.
ah yes, new phenomenon, graphic T's
Ah, but were they eye-popping? (Oh, yeah they were that too).
His magnum opus Infinite Dressed
I think the pants trend is simply uncool older people finally starting wearing slim fits so younger people (middle, high school, college) slowly started shifting to wider fits. Also some of it is probably fashion forward people and brands adopting it but I think it’s mostly the former driving the big adoption.
Well I wear wide pants so they're officially uncool now
I enjoyed this piece. Funny to read Jonah in his serious reporter register when I’m used to his stuff on Blackbird Spyplane.
I also enjoyed this, fun read and felt very true
Definitely, this paragraph was basically that
Trends change partly because those interested in fashion as a way of expressing themselves want to do something different than "dress like they are told"
Which leads to fun swings back and forth of what's cool and what's just seen as boring / mainstream
Ya I got some big pants recently, very uncool now, my b sorry