Like many people, I am repulsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Kennedy failson improbably appointed as US Secretary of Health and Human Services who has made quick work of allowing measles cases to surge with his vaccine skepticism. (For more on the dangers RFK Jr. poses to society, I recommend you read his late cousin Tatiana Schlossberg’s deft New Yorker essay outlining how his tenure as HHS secretary has degraded the state of public health in the US and imperiled the lives of cancer patients like her.)
Still, I can’t help being fascinated—in a gawking-at-a-car-crash way—by his less broadly harmful, but no less bizarre lifestyle choices, such as maintaining a “roadkill”-forward diet and wearing jeans seemingly all the time, including while he exercises. “I just started doing that a long time ago because I would go hiking in the morning and then I’d go straight to the gym,” Kennedy told Fox News of his penchant for denim-clad workouts. “I found it was convenient, and now I’m used to it, so I just do it."
Much has been made of Kennedy’s jeans thing in the press, but we here at Vogue aren’t content to merely parrot the news of the day; we much prefer to follow in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and get our gonzo journalism on. That’s why I donned some denim of my own yesterday and booked a bike at SoulCycle, determined to find out just what our HHS secretary is doing to himself during his workouts.
Prior to my 10:30 session at SoulCycle Brentwood, I hadn’t attempted a spin class in about five years. I used to be a regular at Flywheel’s Showtunes Spin nights in West Hollywood, where my friend Hannah and I would cycle out our angst over men not texting us back (Hannah’s crush from back then is now her husband and I no longer recall the name of mine, so all’s well that ends well, but I digress). Even then, when I was in the grips of an eating disorder and big on self-abnegation, I didn’t hate myself quite enough to sit through a heated, candlelit, 45-minute spin class in pants that actively weighed me down.
Luckily for me, the Brentwood class wasn’t too packed, so there weren’t too many fellow exercisers there to gawk at my unorthodox choice of attire. (In case you’re wondering, I cycled through my vast denim Rolodex of two whole pairs of jeans and selected a loose, boot-cut pair from Good American, agreeing with my colleague Margaux Anbouba that my dark-rinse flares would probably get caught in the bike pedals.) The employees at SoulCycle’s front desk, on the other hand, were absolutely delighted by my mission, conspiratorially telling me that they’d seen people join their classes in everything from scrubs to cargo pants—but never jeans.
“Actually, I did see a guy come in for his first ride wearing jeans,” interjected a studio employee named Bridget. “I think he was with his girlfriend and forgot they’d booked the class, but he did the whole thing. It was very brave.” Determined to be no less brave than this anonymous male Bridget-impresser, I mounted my bike and called over another kind SoulCycle employee to snap a “before” pic.
A moment later, the class started, bringing with it a deep, dark desire to unclip my shoes from their pedals and run for the hills. I don’t love working out even when I’m wearing the appropriate clothes for it. But attempting to keep pace with an incredibly fit (and, it should be said, very encouraging) SoulCycle instructor while trapped in a denim thigh prison made me more miserable than I can recall being in a group fitness class in quite some time.
After 10 or 15 minutes of actually trying to do the class, I was too sweaty and unhappy to keep going, but also too humiliated to slink out of the room early. Instead, I sat awkwardly on my bike for another 20 minutes or so, finally rejoining the class during the arm-workout section. Then, emboldened by the Keri Hilson banger blasting through the speakers, I rode my way to the finish line with the rest of my SoulCycle peers, dreaming of the moment when I could unzip my now-sweat-soaked jeans and apply Weleda Skin Food to what I could already tell was the beginning of a heat rash.
As I staggered into the changing room to snap an “after” picture for my work group chat, I marveled at how neatly my jeans had negated the post-class glow that I traditionally associate with spin class. Instead of feeling exuberant and powerful, all I felt was sticky and desperate for a clean pair of sweatpants.
Look, my experiment in RFK Jr.-style jeans-clad exercise wasn’t the worst thing I could have experienced by following his lead (I could have a rubella rash or, at the very least, a nasty case of E. coli contracted from frozen bear patties right now). Nevertheless, it… wasn’t great. If you absolutely have to go spinning in jeans, I suppose I’d recommend the tightest ones you can find, because yanking a “boyfriend-fit” pair up over your hips to avoid exposing your entire ass to the row of bikes behind you will really get in the way of a proper workout.
In the end, my 45-minute experiment left me pretty much as I was before: deeply troubled by the vast expanse of RFK Jr.’s perversities, but now with an added layer of sweat and a mean case of inner-thigh chafing. If I somehow contract a yeast infection from all this, I’m invoicing HHS!
