Baggy Sweatpants Are Better
How many pairs of sweatpants are in your closet? Go on, count ‘em: You’ve got your over-engineered gym sweats, your ratty lazing-about-the-house sweats, your standard grocery-run sweats, your discreet Zoom sweats, and maybe even a couple of backups for laundry day. Here’s the good news: plenty of us have amassed similar collections. Here’s the bad news: the baggy sweatpants we’re talking about here are…none of those, actually.
What all those sweats share in common—beyond the cozy-as-hell fabrics and an ability to make Jerry Seinfeld mad—is a certain ankle-hugging cut. If the 2010s ushered in the rise of slim, stacked designer sweatpants, the 2020s herald a new dawn in the world of bleeding-edge fleece. So allow us to introduce the baggy sweatpants you should be wearing right now, which are distinguished from the sweats you already own by two crucial factors: a wide, loose silhouette, and an utter lack of elastic by the ankles.
If we had you at “wide, loose silhouette”, ignore the rest of our spiel and scroll on down. But if the idea of sweatpants that fit just like ginormous jeans or giant chinos feels a little startling, take a gander at any of your style heroes from twenty years ago—chances are, they were wearing a pair exactly like these, a cornerstone of the Y2K slacker uniform. They still look killer with a zip-up hoodie and sneakers, but they also look equally at home—elegant, even!—pooling over chunky derbies or dainty loafers, a galaxy-brain high-low matrix your joggers could only hope to approximate. Toss ‘em on with a rumpled oxford shirt or a scuzzy sweater and you might not be ready for the office, but you sure won’t look like you’ve given up.
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