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You will probably be tempted to blame my age when I tell you I’ve been reluctant to join the wide-leg revolution that has been sweeping pants for several seasons now. But I swear I haven’t been avoiding these cuts because I’m a millennial, or at least that’s not the only reason. No, I would contend that I have been circumspect about baggier pants less because of my age than because I am a control freak—and these silhouettes present a very clear challenge to anyone who seeks basic control over their bodily form.
There is a predictability to the performance of slimmer-leg pants that I feel goes little acknowledged. How they look standing up is about the same as how they’ll look sitting down, just as how they look while still is not so different from how they look in motion. When you’re dealing with all the volume and proportion that bigger pants bring, it’s very easy to upset that delicate balance by sitting down or putting one foot in front of the other—two things that, call me a fashion victim, I find it pretty necessary to do. Where a second ago you looked cool, suddenly you move slightly and your pants are hanging all weird around your shoe, your beautiful draping instantly transforming into an awkward canopy without any warning. The whole slouchy-pants look depends upon the pants slouching just so, but I’m here to tell you that the percentage of time most of these pants are operating at “just so” is much lower than anyone wants to admit. And never is this more true than when weather is involved.
Baggy pants are simply one of the least practical, most absurd items of clothing a person can wear when it rains or snows. If your answer to that is “Well, don’t wear them when it rains or snows, then,” I would only point out that they’re the main pants available right now. Last year, we seemed to reach some sort of big-pants tipping point, as stores like Pacsun saw baggy jeans jump from making up 8 percent of their denim sales the previous year to fully 80 percent. The wider-pants trend was so mainstream that the New York Times Magazine meditated on it at length, urging people to embrace them even if they feel stupid doing so. You now have to go out of your way to find non-baggy pants, and it’s not like weather prediction has suddenly become a lot better (if anything, the opposite). So yeah, baggy pants and precipitation are inevitably going to mix. As an adult, I can suffer through keeping an old pair of jeans that have gone out of style around to wear when it rains, but think of the teens—is it so much to ask that the prevailing cool pants be a style that can be worn every day, regardless of forecast?
As wider legs have come back into vogue, veterans of the ’90s dalliance with this shape have occasionally waxed nostalgic about the particular torture of wearing them on rainy days: As a Guardian writer taking ultrawide-leg jeans for a spin earlier this year put it, “Like many millennials (and those who lived through the 70s before me), I can replay the hell of a damp wide hem like it was yesterday.” I too remember the way that the bottom few inches of these pants not only regularly wore out and ripped from being constantly stepped on under normal circumstances but how on rainy days they would get wet from being dragged through puddles and across the ground. They would stay that way long after the rest of you was inside, ever so often brushing up against your skin in case you momentarily forgot that they weren’t dry yet. I don’t want to overstate how annoying it was—rain brings all kinds of survivable inconveniences, after all—but it was also sort of nuts to think that your outfit could at any moment be so vulnerable to getting ruined, by such an utterly common thing. What good is a stylish outfit that can’t withstand a little water? In other words, the struggle was real then, and it has become real once more.
I spent some time looking into what today’s young people, the primary wearers of big pants, do in the face of wet weather and was amused to discover that they do have, if not a solution, a widespread in-joke about the indignities of this experience that has been trotted out in a series of moderately popular social media posts over the last few years. Male, female, and nonbinary Gen Zs alike know that when it rains, you attempt to preserve your pants by hiking them up in the manner a Disney princess hikes up her voluminous skirt. I’ll grant them that it’s not a bad method for avoiding the worst puddles and mud, but it doesn’t solve the problem, and as the princess comparison implies, it doesn’t exactly look cool.
At the risk of sounding more like a crank than I already do, here is where I admit that I’m bothered by more than just the prospect of the bottom of these pants getting wet: I’m convinced that baggy pants in general get wetter in the rain than other pants, that they are in fact magnets for water in a way other bottoms aren’t. Is it just that there’s more material and more surface area that can get wet? And maybe something about how it can penetrate more when your warm body isn’t filling out all the fabric of the pants? Whatever it is, I believe it may particularly affect lighter fabrics like linens and twill, mostly because the two pairs of really baggy pants I finally caved and bought this year are those materials and I managed to get drenched in both of them. I searched in vain for some scientific explanation of this, but I didn’t find one, either because it’s intuitive and doesn’t need to be explained or because I’m insane and the only person who believes that science and not my own idiocy is responsible for my pants getting soaked.
In any case, I reached out to a few experts for tips on wearing my wide-leg pants without looking like I got caught in a monsoon. Alison Gary, a stylist who runs a website called Wardrobe Oxygen and has written about how “grown-ass” women can make wider pants work for them, got back to me and agreed that this is a “legit problem,” which was validating. She offered up a few ideas in an email: “My husband is a cyclist and I learned about these Velcro bands cyclists use to cinch their pant leg to prevent it from getting into the chain, but it also keeps the pant around the ankle instead of near the ground,” she wrote. She suggested trying this or re-creating it with a scrunchie, or tucking the pants into boots, or pinning the back of the pant hem up with a safety pin or special hem clip.
I’m eager to try out Gary’s suggestions, and the Gen Z princess method too while I’m at it, and maybe even the Wirecutter’s recommendation, which is wearing a whole separate pair of rain pants over your pants. Funnily enough, for almost all the time I worked on this piece, I’ve been waiting for it to rain really hard so I might test-drive these techniques, but somehow I haven’t ended up outside under conditions worse than drizzling. Is this a sign that, despite all my angst about how this style of pants is plainly incompatible with modern life, this is not actually that big of an issue? Um, no, that definitely can’t be. And I’m seeing some rain toward the end of the 10-day forecast, so if you need me, I’ll be busy preparing for battle at sea.
