Saturday, Fourth of July weekend, lakeside with friends. Voices nearby are discussing the suddenly unsettled state of Western politics—in France, the UK, here in the US. Me, I’m gazing at drifting clouds, wondering what’s going on with pants.
We all have our ways of processing the world. The pastoral setting had put me in mind of Jonathan Anderson’s fall 2024 Loewe show—its country-manor-through-the-looking-glass vibe. One striking thing about that collection was its smorgasbord of trouser silhouettes: balloon-shaped cargos; swishy harem pants; one style I can best describe as “überjodhpurs”—explosive volume through the thigh, tapered at the waist and calf. This is a very incomplete list.
Anderson wasn’t the only designer running the pants gamut this season. At Bottega Veneta, they came stovepipe, tulip shape, cropped flare, slouchy. Chemena Kamali’s Chloé debut ranged from knit short-shorts to fringed leather jeans that transformed into teardrops of chiffon. Elsewhere, designers were decisive: Sabato De Sarno, at Gucci, was all about shorts. At Sacai, Chitose Abe showed zero pants, but all her looks were styled with “pantaboots,” as my colleague Nicole Phelps dubbed them: over-the-knee boots resembling trouser legs. A bracing idea, but perhaps the most divisive item on the runway, pants-wise, for fall, was Miu Miu’s low-slung skinny jean, appearing like the ghost of 2004 to jolt us out of our bagginess. Meanwhile, around the time these shows were afoot, Kristen Stewart was on her press tour for Love Lies Bleeding, and mostly wearing no pants at all.
What I’m saying is, it’s pants chaos out there. You can’t trust pants anymore—as in, you can no longer build a wardrobe around a pair. When Phoebe Philo introduced slouchy satin trousers at her spring 2013 Céline show, it sent a clear message about the way clothes were, for the foreseeable future, going to be worn—with Birkenstocks and a shrug. Those trousers laid a foundation. I love Jonathan Anderson’s work at Loewe, and I’d happily own a closetful of his clothes, but what makes him perhaps the paradigmatic designer of this moment is that he refuses to send any such message. Not that he doesn’t pursue his themes with rigor—he does—but his collections are fragmentary in a way that is emblematic of the fashion world at large: Every outfit’s a one-off now. The foundation has crumbled. And amid the rubble things are getting very, very weird. In short, the situation with pants parallels the condition of Western politics: mere anarchy loosed upon the world.
But maybe there is a path forward—and a pant to unite us all.
Explain the no-pants thing, I ask stylist Harry Lambert. His client Emma Corrin had just appeared at the New York premiere of Deadpool Wolverine in a Nina Ricci leotard. “Explain?” Lambert replies with a laugh. What’s to explain? Corrin helped kick-start the trend, appearing on the fall 2023 Miu Miu catwalk in a pair of spangled hot pants; it’s become a signature look. That said, she likes to rock oversize, too—the dimension Lambert himself favors when getting dressed.
“I’m loving this world of oversize tailoring and slouchy, baggy—that sense of ease,” says Lambert, who’s iffy on the return of the skinny. “I remember feeling hot and self-conscious in those jeans.”
My chat with Lambert thumbnails three instincts we tend to have around pants—and, it occurs to me, around politics. “No pants” is radical: Like the Loewe überjodhpur or Sacai pantaboot, it aims to punch through convention, to engage a thought experiment. Why can’t the world be other than it is? What if we didn’t wear pants? The return of the skinny, meanwhile, is reactionary. I don’t mean that in a “let’s take women’s reproductive rights away” sense; more like when you perceive that things are stuck in a rut and, unsure how to push forward, retreat to the familiar. There’s a lot of that going on now, culturally—reboots and remakes and songs sampling old hits and the valorization of traditional gender roles. This is all about risk aversion, whereas the sense of ease Lambert refers to is just that: the universal desire to be comfortable, to do as we please—which, post–Cold War, has almost entirely superseded the demands of public formality. You can see that as a liberation, or you can see that as the loss of a certain type of respect we pay to others, a pact of common accountability. It’s a bit of both, I suspect. But the balance has gotten way out of whack.
“The current discourse about trends—You can wear whatever you want now, and so it’s chaos—reminds me a lot of the 1960s, and if you look back, it’s true: It was everything all at once,” says Avery Trufelman, host of Articles of Interest, a podcast about clothes and how they fit into our lives and our world. She points me to the Thomas Frank book The Conquest of Cool, which traces the ways advertisers and corporations helped fuel ’60s-era hyper-individualism for the simple reason that profits rise when people buy more and stranger stuff to stand out. Eventually, the bubble burst. Fashion got more conservative, more uniform.
We were due that correction. Instead, we got a total fashion collapse: COVID, and the reign of the sweatpant. Maybe—maybe—what’s been going on with pants is a lurching effort to get people out of their sweats and back into the habit of dressing with purpose and rigor and imagination. Seducing them via, variously, the radical, the familiar, the comfortably roomy?
One beneficiary of all this pants topsy-turviness is Frankie Shop founder Gaëlle Drevet. I discovered her store on Instagram, around the time I got my first vaccine shot, and ordered a pair of loose menswear-style trousers that struck me as the perfect post-sweats starter pant. Apparently, every other fashion-y girl on the planet got the same memo. “It’s still our number one,” says Drevet, who is based in Paris, “but now we have evolved to different fits.”
Indeed. The Frankie Shop feed regularly repopulates with pant styles; the day we speak, Drevet has just made a new pair, “with a super-low waist—very different for us, so that’s an experiment.” Mostly, though, she’s been focus-grouping shorts on her 1.4 million Instagram fans—“short shorts, high-waisted, low-waisted, some knit, some sheer.”
“If there was one pair of pants that works with everything, we’d just carry that,” Drevet says. Alas. What’s broken can never be made whole. Or can it?
Alissa Zachary is the founder of High Sport, best known for its buzzy kick-flares. The brand was born of a simple conceit: Make pants women want to wear. All the time. In this respect, it’s not so different from Phoebe Philo, the namesake label of the designer who, at Céline, created trousers that made us feel as if the world made sense. I exaggerate, but only just. If I had $8,900 to throw at my dream pants right now, it would be the cinched-waist Phoebe Philo pair with strips of Napa leather bonded to chiffon. Sadly, I do not. The High Sport flares are exactly one tenth of the price, which is still wildly expensive—but, as Zachary points out, those pants are also trend-proof: High Sport launched with the style in 2021, sells them today, and, she says, will continue selling them until such time as the sun swells and swallows Earth, or thereabouts.
Basically, the High Sport kick-flare is a refined-looking pant that wears like a legging. It’s made of a proprietary cotton-Lycra knit formidable enough to hold a tailored-like structure yet soft enough to give. The pants pull on—no fussy buttons, zips, etc.—and flatter a wide variety of body types. A person looks “dressed” in them, but not in a peacocky way.
“I moved to LA from New York and saw all these women wandering around in their flip-flops and yoga pants and thought, No,” recalls Zachary, who spent 10 years at The Row before launching High Sport. “I like looking pulled-together, but I also like that LA lifestyle—so I started thinking about how you could take that athleisure ethos and give it a more polished expression.”
In Hegelian terms, the High Sport flares move history forward dialectically, synthesizing two previously opposed concepts—public formality and self-pleasing ease—into a new form. A new foundation. Politicians, take heed: By recognizing that you can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s answers, Zachary manifested the unifying pant of our time.
Unless it’s not. Who knows what’s going on these days? Pants-wise; politics-wise. I’m writing this in August, and anything could happen between now and this magazine landing on newsstands. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that a new world is coming. We’re already en route; the ship has left shore. Maybe that’s what the no-pants thing is about: If you’re heading into uncharted waters, it’s best to travel light.
