THIS IS A BLOG POST ABOUT BIG PANTS
I don’t remember the first time I saw “Y2k” used as an aesthetic descriptor, but I know it was shortly after my late-zoomer roommate (the inimitable genius DJ FAILURE) bought a pair of gigantic vintage CHAPS brand carpenter jeans in 2019. Our discussions in that time had turned often to the idea of “big pants”. In the post-lockdown chronosphere, where days and weeks crawl sluggish and years fly by at the clip of a foiling monohull, it is easy to forget that there was a moment not long ago when big pants were not a foregone conclusion, but a topic worthy of serious discussion. How big was too big? Was the play wide, or baggy, or both? At some point immediately after the election of Donald Trump, the liberating potential of wider pants began to trickle out of the academy and into the streets— Long the demesne of fashion theorists keeping parochial Japanese clothing houses afloat through proxy sellers and secondhand markets and posting daring but ridiculous fitpics on forums that still used bbPress architecture, big pants had begun to make serious inroads with studio artists, poets, and other people in dire need of real jobs.
Big pants are fascinating not least of all because their road to dominance was not paved by the youth. The first major victory for big pants was with the “older” creative intelligentsia, fashion-minded urbanites in their 30s and 40s who were looking to stay on the cutting edge while contending with a newly pressing need to dress one’s age. These big pants were usually ‘wide trousers’, linen and worsted wool, with dramatic pleats and enough crop for a clean line at the ankle. Adherents saw them as exciting and new, yet somehow timeless, fitting the aesthetic of a cottage gardener as much as an urban ceramicist. The role they played in pure silhouette, though not cultural function, was similar to JNCO jeans and Tripp Pants, a fact readily commented on by the less fashionable cohort who didn’t “get it”, who clung still like rats to flotsam to slim fit chino pants or high waisted skinny jeans, who thought rhinestone’d graphic tees and baggy pants with contrast stitching were implied to be part of the childish things mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13:11. Those of us in wide trousers knew they were wrong. The only thing these wide trousers (elegant, playful, sophisticated) shared with the big youth pants of the late 90s and early aughts (garish, cringe) was leg opening diameter measurements. Wide trousers were different, new, fun yet grown up, cosmopolitan, Japanese and French and both SoHos, pairable with high-GSM ecru tees or linen button downs or various forms of outlandish vests; birkies or clogs or sneakers or minimalist platform sandals. Wear wide trousers in the studio and wabi their sabi with pigments, then wear them to the gallery showing. Wear them with a mock neck merino croppy to dinner and drinks Hinge dates on the Lower East Side.
Slowly but surely the wide trousers overtook, becoming a de facto statement piece not just for 36-year-olds secure in their excellent taste and receding hairlines, but for sophisticated 22-year-olds who read Verso books and date six to eight years older. No self described millennial could’ve predicted what came next:
Y2K: The Interconnected Network Of Computers Brings Catastrophe At The Dawn Of A New Age
DO YOU REMEMBER DOING MOLLY AND READING HIPSTERRUNNOFF? (NOT AT THE SAME TIME… UNELSS?)
Those of us with enough grey hairs (at least two) to have participated in Health Goth discourse will also remember the girlie throne ascendance of the high-waisted jean. Maybe you remember your Gen-X colleagues, woefully stumbling through the twilight years of their cultural empire, crying out “mom jeans” and “FUPA” through gritted teeth and tears as it became apparent that their patrol caps and wry stencil graffiti and cargo pants and turntablism all had their feet firmly planted in an inescapable grave that was dug when no one was looking. High waisted jeans became unimpeachable cornerstones via Lana Del Rey (PBUH) influenced funhouse mirror reflections of early 60s girlie-girl aesthetics and gentrified nu-90s neochicana swag that saw white girls with lawyer parents drinking 40oz bottles of Mickeys and getting finger tattoos and bumping Kreayshawn. A new era had dawned; what was old became new, out became in, the fellas started fucking with pleather jogger pants and Jordan 1s, five panel camps and snapbacks replaced fitted caps, Lil B The Based God happened, Doom Metal got popular, everyone loved Kanye West and it stopped being okay to kinkshame or call something “gay” in a derogatory fashion. We had no choice but to Let People Enjoy Things, guardposts at the gate we’re abandoned. What A Time To Be Alive. We knew it wouldn’t last, but it did. Sort of.
THIS IS NOT A BLOG POST ABOUT BIG PANTS THIS IS A BLOG POST ABOUT THE MOTHER SNAKE COLLAPSING THE WHEEL
The wide trousers talked about at the top of this blog post set the stage for something wholly different: the snide JNCO prophecy set forth by our loser friends content with slim-fit menswear was fulfilled by our juniors. In many ways, Y2K fashion is simply the latest manifestation of the same cycle that saw us crush the skulls of all who came before beneath the soles of Doc Marten boots below high waisted jeans. On a long enough timeline, everything timeless becomes cringe and everything cringe becomes timeless and those of us who are now “getting old” start to jump ship and rewrite history and pretend we never didn’t like Deftones or Drum And Bass and rue getting rid of our Audigier Ed Hardy. We get the tribal tattoos we swore we’d never get, renaming them to something less problematic and more culturally neutral like “Traditional Geometry” or “Cybersigilism”. We squeal and writhe like pigs in slop when 100 Gecs is inexplicably played at 2000s night. This is how it’s always been.
But what about all the guys dressing like it’s the 70s? What about the grunge kids? What about the kids who wear a different era or subculture every day of the week? What about the original wide trouser swag? That only really hit big like 3 years ago right? Surely this Y2K shit can’t leave them all in the dust! Why, just yesterday I saw a girl in full Visual Kei hanging out with 2 guys in simulacra 1991 skater outfits and another girl who looked like Siouxie Sioux! They were all, at the oldest, 23! What the fuck is going on here?
Halle’s Comet or El Nino or Seasonal Flooding. Reliable cycles of death and rebirth thrown off kilter by something less predictable, more chaotic, heating the earth and organizing Orcas into misanthropic death squads. A podcaster interviews an dendrologist about the National Parks system, land management, the bending of wild nature to our will of pleasure. He says forests should burn regularly to proliferate new growth. Our desire to proliferate exurban liebenstraum to the edge of the mountain is dangerous.
“Everything old is new again,” sings Peter Allen, gayly plunking about on a piano in a sequins jumpsuit. I look in the mirror-in-the-mirror-in-the-mirror, and countless versions of myself appear, in Doc Martens, in Jordan 4s, in Rick Owens sandals, in wide trousers, in skinny jeans, in vintage and faux-vintage graphic tees, in an Etsy-purchased Blasphemy: Fallen Angel Of Doom shirt, cropped and with the sleeves cut off at the neck so it’s kind of slutty, in a chore coat, in a cowboy hat, in an intentionally oversized suit with no shoulder pads so that it is slinky and elegant and does not make me look like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. Tattoos cover my body, I am naked, I am covered in wounds, I am sucking dick in an ethical porno, I am screaming, I am praying, I am going to Traditional Latin Mass, I am occupying Wall Street, I am The Dark Side Of The Moon cotton burnout tee purchased at Target in 2006 made translucent rainbow flesh like the stained glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear.
The candles in the hall go out. The mirrors fade from view. Now there is cartwheel with infinite spokes lovingly crafted 400,000 years ago by an expert wheelwright. Strips of vibrant paint line the strakes, a different color where each spoke meets the rim. The wheel turns and turns in the infinite dark high above our earth, a dazzling and fluid rainbow at the perimeter. If I watch it spin long enough, I notice a writhing living thing is wrapped around the wheel. I put my fist in front of my face so my eyes can see past the bright colors and I realize I am looking at an ouroboros, mother snake feasting on its tail, that has existed since the atomic bomb and tee shirt and electric guitar all conspired to kill God. In His absence, she coddles and nurtures the wheel, providing herself with just enough sustenance that she may grow to always be the exact length of the wheel’s circumference.
My eyes adjust further and I see now that the snake is diseased. She is white eyed, panicked and tumorous, gobbling away at her tail ferociously, excreting over the earth and exhibiting behaviors congruous to some cosmic prion disease. She can no longer keep up, her grip on the wheel necessarily tightens, not a swaddle anymore but a stranglehold. The spokes begin to splinter crack, groaning under the stress of it all, pointing and jutting every which way but loose. A shattering is imminent. I shut my eyes to shield them from the debris.