Baggy or narrow? Boxy or tight? This fall, the pants debate extends to the guys, too. Below, one Vogue editor tells us why this season, emboldened by the likes of Saint Laurent, he’s sticking to his skinny jeans. And over here, another point of view.
I bought my first pair of skinny jeans after seeing them in W magazine. This was sometime in 2007 or 2008. It didn’t matter that the jeans on the page were for women; I soon decided that the sun had set on my mid-aught days of wearing True Religion boot-cuts or Rock & Republic standard fits. (Pictures of me from 2005 in bleached True Religions as a teenager at Marquee in New York seem wantonly ridiculous now.)
The pair featured in W was from Ksubi (once Tsubi), the sometimes-dead, sometimes-alive Australian streetwear brand. (It’s alive right now, with its financial woes righted, it seems.) This, in and of itself, captured my attention—why the hell wasn’t I born a skateboarder from Sydney? At that point, I was just an ex-squash player from Long Island, drinking my way through sunny college. Yet, beneath that unsexy side-by-side, I think I finally recognized the permissibility of going tight—that there were clothes out there for men with bodies like mine. A little research revealed that Ksubi-slash-Tsubi had a store on Mulberry Street. So down I went with my friend Chloe, and, lo, it was revealed to us that they designed men’s clothes in addition to women’s, and behold, I walked out of the shop wearing my debut pair, a warm gray wash of narrow drainpipes, the company’s double-cross logo standing proudly on the back of my left thigh.
These days, 90 percent of my denim wardrobe consists of Ksubi skinny jeans—I own around 20 pairs. My favorites are the very skinniest, one pair in uniform black, one in greasy noir. Years ago, I would wear this cut—I believe the label calls it the Van Winkle—with outré trendy pieces, like Prada’s rhinestone-encrusted golf jacket or Givenchy’s Rottweiler sweatshirt. No longer. But while those pieces have been deep-sixed in my closet, the skinnies live on. For instance, as I write this, I am wearing a pair with Stan Smiths and a Yeezus at Glastonbury hoodie. I look far too casual to be in the office, perhaps—but I like how I look. The skinnies are the anchor. To note, I also own Acne Studios and Saint Laurent, those fancier skinny- jean hawkers, but I don’t put them on so often. The Ksubis are, for all intents and purposes, spray-paint-tight. Wet suit tight. That’s why I like them so much. That’s why I wear them so much. Here’s my rationale:
1. I’m 6-foot-6 (6-foot-4-ish with my worrying posture), and I have thin legs—not runway thin, but the sort that look like they’re drowning and gawky when covered by, say, a chino from J.Crew or a dress pant from Theory. Even “slim-fit” looks big and kind of gross on me. So, the tighter, the better.
2. Skinny jeans give me, and presumably other thin guys, an illusion of “an ass,” which is something I’ve never possessed otherwise and something I think I might like to have one day if I ever make it to the gym for more than 10 minutes without losing interest. The perkiness is a total mirage, but in anything other than skinny jeans, I feel depressed and flat-butted. There’s one other potential hazard in this arena, around front: the male camel-toe—but that’s for another post.
3. Because they’re cool! Hedi thought so at Dior Homme; he still thinks so at Saint Laurent. For those worried about the “trendiness” of skinny jeans, I’d venture that they aren’t really “a trend.” They’re a basic, if you like them. That’s it. A wardrobe classic for the 2000s, as normal as—I don’t know—the waistcoat for the 1920s.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should wear skinny jeans. This is merely a defense as to why I wear them. A defense as to why Dylan Brosnan, Pierce’s lanky Saint Laurent muse of a son, wears them. A tip of the hat to female skinny-jean aficionados, like Olivia Palermo, Gisele Bündchen, Miranda Kerr, and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. I suspect that for a lot of guys “built” like me, they too err on the side of the long and lean—other fits just don’t work.
http://www.vogue.com/ 
No comments:
Post a Comment