Sweatpants.
Jon Moy is a freelance writer based in Detroit. He’s written about a lot of things, but mostly about fashion. He’s just happy to be here. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @moybien1212.
At this point you guys have probably heard a million preludes to what eventually becomes a pitch on why you need to buy some sweatpants. But here’s the thing, everyone already knows that sweatpants are essentials, self-isolation or not. Two camps have emerged when it comes to at-home style, the “nothing matters on Zoom anyways, so we should all just lean into the casual revolution” camp and the “been had sweatpants, been dressing like a louche heir to a medium-sized fast food franchisee’s empire so long the HR person sent me a ‘business casual primer’ email” camp. I have been squarely positioned in the latter, but I’m not particularly hung up on how you’ve come to the realization that you need more sweatpants in your life because even if we take different paths, we often end up at the same destination. And that’s all that matters.
I distinctly remember wearing a pair of cargo sweatpants in like, 2003 and fucking loving them. The only real caveat to wearing cargo sweatpants is that paradoxically if you put too much stuff (like, two things) in the aforementioned cargo pockets, the sweatpants would constantly be on the precipice of falling down. But that didn’t stop me from wearing them or putting things in the cargo pockets because evidently in 2003 I needed my flip phone to bounce around my mid-thigh tethered only by an improbably long wire connected to one of those single earpiece and microphone combo things that everyone had then. I looked like the guy in a mid-level drug dealer’s security detail that definitely gets taken out first by the highly trained and coordinated assassination squad of a foreign narcotics conglomerate that a local hero cop tries in vain to warn his chief of police about.
The particular sweatpants we’ve all come here to talk about don’t have cargo pockets, but they do have sweet triangular gussets inset along the thighs. These are designed to give you a bit more room in the top block while still giving a nice taper on the way down to the ankle. A good taper is probably the most important aspect of a pair of sweatpants. That and just sagging them a bit. That is key, you gotta sag your sweatpants, even if it’s just a little. They’re also made from 500 gsm fleece. What does ‘gsm’ mean? Grams per square meter. Knowing what an acronym stands for doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand the meaning behind the words the letters stand for, but at least when people compliment you on your new sweatpants you can say, “Thanks, they have a good weight to them, they’re actually 500 grams per square meter.” They won’t know what that means, and they definitely don’t want you to tie up the Zoom meeting with an explanation about how if you took a square meter of the fabric and weighed it in grams, that would be the gsm number. Just take the compliment and make sure your virtual background is that bonus level from Street Fighter II where you fuck up cars.
