PONTIFICATING ABOUT PANTS

A cover story by Jonah Weiner in this week’s New York Times Magazine (March 3, 2024) piqued my interest: “Why Are Pants So Big (Again): And what the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves.”

Above: The cover of this week’s The New York Times Magazine. Photograph by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times.

For the past several seasons, I’ve been wondering why European runways continue to feature huge, flowy, silly-looking trousers that drag on the floor, pants that I’ve rarely seen American men wear. As Weiner so creatively put it, “Month by month, pants got puffier, growing higher rises and sprouting more and more pleats. Hemlines that once severely tapered have now expanded, hovering like UFOs above shoes or pooling atop them like swirls of soft-serve ice cream.”

The article is long (a good five pages) and I’m not sure how many readers will spend that much time pontificating about pants. That said, it includes some great lines that I can’t resist sharing, including advice from comedian Noah Garfinkel from a 2021 tweet: “Whatever style pants look like SH-T to you are the pants you’re supposed to wear. As soon as they start to look normal to you, those are not the right pants anymore. So you should always be wearing pants you think look stupid…”

From comedian Larry David: “Trying on pants is one of the most humiliating things a man can suffer.” And from American filmmaker David Lynch, “I am searching for a good pair of pants. I’ve never found a pair that I just love. If they’re not right, which they never are, it’s a sadness.”

Weiner gets very involved trying to explain the inexplicable: the rhythm of fashion cycles and how they reflect our culture. “At some points in time,” he writes, “big pants have read as manly and skinny ones as feminine. At other points, these valences have flipped perfectly. Where fashion and technology converge is in their mutual dependence on novelty and obsolescence… The current swing to big pants might prove nothing more than a brief overcorrection after the long reign of small ones…”

I asked a well-respected pants maker in North America to weigh in. Says Ron Balinsky at Ballin, “For our customers, the trend is still clean and slim. I was just in Milan for the fabric shows and was looking out for more aggressive fashion on trendy attendees. It seemed only about five percent were wearing some type of looser, baggier pant. This trend has not yet made its way to Canada, and quite honestly, we’ve had little response to pleats, which we show as a fashion statement. Our customers in both Canada and the U.S. are staying away from fuller pants. Maybe this will be one of those trends that gets the press but simply fizzles out…”

Editor’s note: I own only one pair of full-cut, wide-bottom trousers, which is part of my only made-to-measure suit. While it took a while to feel comfortable in such flowy pants, I now wear them so often that the bottoms are frayed. (Won’t someone please pronounce frayed bottoms the next hot fashion trend?)