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At some point over the last decade, it became OK — encouraged, even — to sell men’s trousers and shorts featuring a giant logo across the crotch.
Pyrex was doing it during the ‘swag era’ of the early 2010s, but Corteiz popularised it much more recently — and now everyone’s at it, from fast fashion brands to luxury labels, including Celine, Vetements, Palm Angels and Rhude. British fast fashion brand Boohoo Man currently has 61 products for sale featuring a design printed or stitched onto the crotch, many of them in dramatic graffiti or gothic-style text. Plus, it seems that every single Instagram streetwear brand in the world has jumped on board, though it’s difficult to track just how much the trend has swelled because retailers and brands name and label the crotch print differently, according to Edited.
It’s the height of conspicuous consumption, and — many would agree — objectively ugly. So how much longer does it have left?
Like so many other clothing trends over the last few years, we have teenagers from 25 years ago to thank for this one. The crotch logo is part of the wider Y2K resurgence, according to fashion journalist and commentator Louis Pisano.
That said, the look is an unusual anomaly in the current retail landscape; its rise has tracked directly alongside the demise of all other heavily branded clothing, particularly in menswear. Retail wholesale platform Joor reported that sales of logo products were down by 43 per cent among North American retailers in 2023, and 16 per cent in EMEA. Earlier this year, a McKinsey report noted “a diminished emphasis on conspicuous logos” among aspirational luxury shoppers.
How the crotch logo became cool again
If Juicy Couture owned the butts of the early 2000s, A Bathing Ape can claim the crotch.
Nigö’s simian-themed streetwear label was the first mass-market brand to slap a logo on the lap of its trousers around 2002, embraced by celebrity fans like Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Pusha T. Before long, various other labels — specifically those at the heart of hip-hop culture — hopped on the bandwagon.
“Labels like Fubu, Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream did a lot of branding in that kind of way,” says Rob Nowill, fashion editor and former content director at Mr Porter. “Then, you had Evisu doing huge branding across the rear of denim and sweatpants.”
The resurgence of this Y2K design staple arguably owes as much to one contemporary brand as it does to labels from the golden age of streetwear. Besides a brief renaissance via Pyrex and Hood By Air in the early 2010s, the groin graphic lay relatively dormant for a couple of decades. “Until Corteiz revived it, reintroducing it as their own,” says Luke Hodson, founder of youth marketing agency Nerds Collective.
The London-based label was launched in 2017, and by 2022 had become the most-hyped brand in streetwear. It now boasts celebrity fans like Drake, Stormzy and Skepta, collaborations with industry giants such as Supreme and Nike, and a ravenous fan base of mostly men aged anywhere from 13 to 30. It also regularly releases new colourways of one particularly recognisable group of products: shorts and joggers with the brand’s signature Alcatraz logo screen-printed across the crotch. To date, “Corteiz jogger” and “Corteiz shorts” are mentioned in 3.5 million and 5.1 million videos on TikTok, respectively.
While some modern designers are undoubtedly pulling inspiration from the early-noughties originators, Corteiz’s cultural influence has “led to a wave of imitations in both streetwear and fast fashion”, says Hodson.
By extension, says Luke Raymond, senior menswear lead at Flannels, “As the style has become more familiar, with more brands producing crotch print styles at mostly mid and mass market, demand has inevitably increased.”
Some commentators suggest that the flurry of brands that have moved in to meet that demand aren’t exactly adding much value. “There were originally brands playing on that Y2K idea in quite an interesting way, and now that’s trickled down to brands doing it quite derivatively,” says Nowill. Stylist Jake Hunte agrees: “The fast fashion brands, they’re just capitalising off of street culture.”
There’s another potential explanation for the rise of the crotch logo. “Logo T-shirts and hoodies drove businesses for years, but that’s slowed down,” says Nowill, referring to menswear in particular. “So this strikes me as brands looking for any remaining real estate on which to slap a logo or a piece of branding.” This is evident at the higher end of the market, where luxury labels are not only printing logos and graphics on crotches, but also adding branding details to hemlines, cuffs, and the knees and shins of denim, like Celine’s track pants or Loewe’s jeans.
This rise of “placement prints and expressive trousers maximises visual impact” for brands, says Jaeyeon Park, youth strategist at trend forecasting company WGSN. Of course, it also maximises visual impact for customers, and that element of conspicuous consumption can’t be ignored. “Some shoppers just like the price point of this stuff, and it’s all about how loud you want to be with it,” says Hunte.
As for the shelf life of the crotch logo, consensus seems to be that the higher end of the market is already moving away from the Y2K influence. “The brands who were leading the way on that have moved on,” says Nowill.
In streetwear, however, the crotch logo remains a signature for brands like Corteiz, Bape and Icecream, and it’s difficult to see that changing. “The crotch-print will always have a place in streetwear,” says Luke Raymond.
Plus, says Nowill, “if you look at the cycle, technically we’re just about right on time” for a resurgence of the swag era, when crotch logos last cropped up. “It’ll be interesting to see how Gen Z reinterprets that,” says Pisano.
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