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.
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.
Persons:
we’d, Paul O’Neill, Levi’s, ” He’d
Locations:
Chicago, Hollywood, Greenwich