Will skinny pants ever have sauce again?

Our NYT Magazine Pants Blockbuster Collab — the story behind it, and profound questions about the future

Mar 05, 2024

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There’s a few Spyplane tees left in the Spy Store. Everything else is sold out forever because we never run back the same jawn twice!!

— Jonah & Erin

Pants: Mamma mia. They are, on balance, the most important garment we can wear when it comes to looking cool as h*ll — or when it comes to looking goofy.

We’ve covered pants closely since Spyplane Year One, weighing in on matters such as How Pants Should Fit Now, Should You Cuff Your Pants, What To Do If Your Pants Seem Too Big (answer: Wear Even Bigger Pants), and The Vital Importance of How Your Pants Interact With Your Shoes.

In early December, 2023, we published our smash-hit roundup of the Best Pants Out, celebrating my & Erin’s picks for Major Achievements in Trouser Excellence, and featuring beloved pants from an illustrious network of swaggy Spyfriends. That day I (Jonah) had a call with my editor at the New York Times Magazine to talk about possible stories. Usually I write profiles of artists and other creative people. But she encouraged me to consider subjects that connect more closely to my 🧠 Spyplane Brain 🧠 too. I thought of that day’s newsletter, and an unlikely one-word pitch popped into mind:

“PANTS.”

Then I said goodbye and hung up. What more did I need to explain?

After all, it’s clear we’re living through a fascinating moment in the history of pants. The improbably long hegemony of slim fit has come to a close, and while the future seems pointed at prolonged Big Pants Supremacy, that’s anything but guaranteed. Especially because trends around style really don’t work the same way they used to!! I also suspected that a Sunday Times audience — a group of curious people, but presumably heavy on Fashion Agnostics — would be interested in a story on pants, because statistically speaking, ~everyone wears them, and despite their ubiquity, pants remain singularly confounding, tantalizing and fraught among garments.

A few days later, the Magazine confirmed the assignment. And this past Sunday, they published it, with an extremely sick cover photo by Bobby Doherty —

Those are some excellent Camiel Fortgens pants on king, peace to the A+ styling by Karolyn Pho

Over the past several weeks, it’s only become clearer that the subject of vertiginously shifting pants norms is on people’s minds. In late January, the Magazine’s own Willy Staley — a narrow pants-rocker as long as I’ve known him — tweeted (below left) that he was finally riding the Big Stupid Pants wave. In late February, the Pants Worshipping Spyfriends at Throwing Fits posted a delightful homage (below right) to “The Ideal Pants Guy,” a chill mythical figure “inclusive of multiple pant widths and lengths.”

Recent developments in Spyplane-adjacent PANTS discourse

And when we did our most recent call for “Personal Spyplane” reader questions on Instagram, we got several queries about this exact issue.

“How much longer will the wide pants phenomenon continue? Where in the cycle are we?” — alxwthr
“Will skinny jeans ever have sauce again? I know we say now that they never did but…” — drewdavid4u
“Thinkpiece on slim vs big pants & how they fit into trend cycles we are prisoners of” — nabsmuttalib
“Hard times create wide pants, good times create slim pants? Slim pants create hard times?” — shillwaffer

So let’s get a little deeper into the issues, and go behind the scenes —

Of the Spyplane x NYT Mag Pants Exposé !!

If we accept the metaphor of the “Pants Pendulum” — swinging back and forth between extremes of volume over time — then your boy has been in the game for a few swings by now.

In high school, back in the mid-’90s wide-leg era, my friends and I aimed for “total shoe engulfment,” pants hems swallowing our footwear and dragging on the ground. (This look is currently popping among today’s own high-school-age youngbloods.)

Cut to the early 2000s: Seeking a reasonably priced slim-fit men’s pant that the market did not provide, my friends & I discovered a passable alternative among Gap’s women’s jeans, copping those as a stopgap on some proto-“indie sleaze” s**t.

Then, one afternoon in spring 2005, I was at South By Southwest hanging with Shout Out Louds, a Swedish band breaking through in that post-Strokes moment, and as I remember it, they were all wearing sick skinny jeans I’d never seen before. They had skulls on the labels. They were a Swedish brand. “Cheap Monday,” the Swedes informed me.

Soon, Cheap Monday would be acquired by H&M and stocked at Barney’s, Urban Outfitters and mad other places worldwide. But in 2005 they were EU-only. Not long after SXSW, Erin and I were in Paris and hoofed it to a streetwear shop named <extremely Parisian streetwear shop voice> Royal Cheese, because we’d received intel that they had Cheap Monday on deck … They did, and we each flew back with pairs, wearing them into the ground. (The denim was much better before they scaled up massively, go figure.)

As we now all know, narrow pants remained the “correct” pants style, broadly speaking, for 15 years or so. I use the adjective narrow because in my mind’s eye I never rocked jeggings-level skinny pants. But in hindsight the pants I did wear, including pairs by Acne, A.P.C., Cloak, and Band of Outsiders, were literal millimeters away from skintight. That felt like a very meaningful distinction to me in real time, but it was, in absolute terms, not much of a distinction at all.

And so we find ourselves in 2024. Will skinny pants ever have sauce again?

Of course they will, at some point. Some people claim skinny’s already back, or that it’s set to roar back imminently…. This is unconvincing to me, but look, once again, The Way Trends Work is as nutty as ever, the FW24 men’s shows had way more slim pants than we were expecting, and it should be noted that, in our Pants Excellence Report, a couple women (though not fellas, notably) shouted out cool slim-fit jeans. Also, lots of people never stopped wearing fitted pants in the first place, either out of a defiant love for the look (like Spyfriend Dave1 from Chromeo), or in some cases simply because word has yet to reach them that skinny is no longer what’s up.

Here’s the main reason why I don’t think a full-blast skinny revival is lurking just around the corner, though. The style had flashes of popularity throughout the 20th century — in the ‘50s, Levi’s responded to a fad for super skinny joints with a model they aptly named SPIKES. But what’s different now is that skinny jeans’ recent, extremely long run of ubiquity left lots of people feeling an intense and nauseated kind of skinny-pant hangover. Like when you get way too drunk on tequila one night, barf a ton, wake up with a gnarly headache, and drink anything but tequila for years because the mere thought of the stuff disgusts you.

One pungent data point along those lines is the whiplash reversal whereby Mike Amiri — the epochally successful L.A. designer best known for his ostentatiously distressed and outrageously expensive skinny jeans — stopped rocking skinny silhouettes and sending them down the runway, and instead started to dress his models, and himself, in capacious, wide-cut trousers. Sure, Hedi Slimane tha Slimfather, first at Dior Homme, then Saint Laurent, and now Celine, has stuck to his guns, never renouncing skinny. Amiri is less critically admired than Slimane, but a major figure all the same in the history of mass skinny-pant success. If he’s out?? That seems like a huge nail in the coffin.

Then again, maybe the fact that he’s abandoned the style gives license to cool people who find Amiri jeans radioactively uncool to get back on board??

Skinny pants will almost certainly bust out of the coffin, given enough time. We might take a spicy little detour through ultra-low-rise flares first: While chatting with GQ’s Sam Hine for the piece, we talked about how early ‘00s hips-baring boot cut joints have been bubbling up lately — from skate videos, to Pharrell’s recent Louis Vuitton runway-bow fits, to Benny Safdie dressing horrible-yet-actually-kind-of-fire on The Curse, to the buzzy young NYC model-turned-designer Raimundo Langlois’s horned-up Bruce-Weber-era Abercrombie-referencing flares.

I’ll tell you this much, though. More power to you if you wanna rock flared jeans with a like ~5-inch micro-rise... Same if you wanna squeeze back into some skinnies this fall…

But I can’t see it for me! No, friends, I wanna dip out right here. Hop off of the d*mn pendulum once and for all. I wouldn’t be surprised if my pants get a bit less wide and sloshy than they are right now, but a full return to Cheap Monday Mode?? Not in the stars for this guy.

Now, am I gonna eat those words in a few years? A few months? I don’t think so. But I gotta acknowledge the slim (😜) possibility. Because, intellectually, I know that great designers remain capable of making cool slim pants, and that sauce lords remain capable of rocking them with verve & panache.

Erin with the d*mn double contributor’s page credit 🫡🫡

And one of the disconcerting phenomena I write about in the Times piece is how you truly can’t trust your eyes sometimes — jawn dysmorphia is real. So I know that while skinny feels like a total non-starter to me right now, it might nonetheless come to feel reasonable again. Alluring, even.

I’m not stoked on the possibility. My aspiration, for reasons I get into in the piece, is to lock in as a “voluminous pant rocker” from here on out…

But one of the themes of the piece is the counterintuitive thrill — the exhilarating PANTS FRISSON! — of embracing “stupidity” as it relates to pushing the limits of your comfort zone. Embracing the fact that your self (and, with it, your style) isn’t fixed, and that we shouldn’t try to pretend otherwise. 🌀👖🌀

If you haven’t yet, you can read my pants essay in the Sunday, March 3, issue of the NYT Magazine, online here.

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