Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?

The balloon just kept expanding. Casting about for signs of the times, pantswise, I noticed that the influential, idiosyncratically stylish rapper Tyler, the Creator — once seen only in slim jeans and cutoff shorts — took to full-fitting slacks. In 2019, the pop star Harry Styles began exploring a gender-fluid style that included expansively flared sailor’s pants (and, for a Vogue cover shoot, a big ruffly dress). In February 2021, the fashion critic Rachel Tashjian tweeted a photo from the Oscars of the Danish film editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen in trousers whose tentlike expanse could have accommodated two of him. “Folks this is ***pants history*** unfolding before our eyes,” she declared. “After years of tiny, tight overly tailored pants, BIG TROUSERS return to the red carpet.” At subsequent awards shows, LaKeith Stanfield, Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne were among those to follow in Nielsen’s extravagantly enswirled footsteps.

In late 2022, J. Crew — that historical paragon of right-thinking mainstream sartorialism — released a new, gargantuan pair of flat-front chinos. They had a vast, blocky rise. The hemlines boasted dinner-plate-size circumferences. J. Crew called them giant-fit chinos. They doubtless came as a shock to some office-casual types who’d long burrowed into the snug, familiar confines of tapered, stretch-fit trousers. But of course, other observers scoffed: These things weren’t even that big.

Throughout the tumult, I consulted a screenshot I’d saved to my desktop. It was a 2021 tweet from the comedian Noah Garfinkel, who distilled the spiraling epistemological vertigo around pants into an absurdist fashion koan. “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.”

To state what’s obvious, I care a lot about pants. I’m tempted to say that I care too much about them, because we often frame a preoccupation with clothes as vain, frivolous and otherwise regrettable. It certainly can be those things. But I try to make sense of it as an abiding fascination with the beautiful, funny, fraught workings of a visual language that all of us speak all the time, deftly or ineptly, consciously or not. It’s a language whose stakes are heightened because, unless we count nudists and hermits, there is no way to opt out of speaking it — not to mention that it can be disorientingly difficult to know when a particular phrasing originated within you and when the words you’re speaking have been placed in your mouth from industry puppet-masters on high.

In 2020, I started writing a newsletter about style and culture called Blackbird Spyplane. Perhaps the most common question from readers concerned — you guessed it — pants. Specifically, How Should They Fit Now? This is because, among clothes, pants command a unique, and uniquely vexing, signifying power: No other garment we routinely wear is as totemic, as eloquent or as problematic. One pants-preoccupied friend of mine, the Wall Street Journal fashion writer Jacob Gallagher, has called pants “the core of an outfit.” The GQ fashion writer Samuel Hine — a dedicated pants Talmudist — recently described them to me as “the most essential garment you can wear.” Even those of us with zero avowed interest in fashion are prone to feel anxiety, vulnerability and dissatisfaction around our pants. Larry David once said that “trying on pants is one of the most humiliating things a man can suffer.” In a 2021 interview, David Lynch — a master of the dread that lurks beneath the surface of the quotidian — confessed: “I am searching for a good pair of pants. I never found a pair of pants that I just love,” adding, “If they’re not right, which they never are, it’s a sadness.”