Have you heard of the crossword puzzle phenomenon? It’s a theory that says once a crossword puzzle has been solved by a large group of people, it will be easier for someone new to complete. Once the answers are out there in the universe, they become more readily available for others to access. It’s a form of collective consciousness that has reared its head in other peculiar ways, too, like how scientific breakthroughs are sometimes arrived at simultaneously by people working completely independently of one another. As Ethan Hawke says in Waking Life: “We’re all telepathically sharing our experiences.”
This telepathic interconnectivity is one explanation for why lots of people start wearing something at the same time. And this is what’s on my mind right now as I look around and all I see is jeans. My highly attuned pants radar is picking up only denim. This is telepathic interconnectivity at work. Trousers just aren’t registering at the moment. All of the cool people I know and see are in jeans. On runways and red carpets, it’s jeans. At parties and in the streets, more jeans.
Is this just what modern life looks like post-1960? When was the last time you didn’t see jeans everywhere? Well, if you’re a menswear enthusiast, then you would know that it’s been a few years since denim has been at the center of the culture. All of the energy has been with pants—pants with pleats, pants with wide legs, pants in interesting fabrics. Now it’s as though everyone all at once decided that the pants thing has grown exhausting. The pants thing became subsumed by corny TikTok and Instagram wannabe influencers. Cool pants, once a cheat code for good style, have become a signifier for the try-hards and the left-behinds. It’s jeans season.
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People often believe trends emerge as the result of an invisible hand—some marketing machine with power and influence beyond our notice. This is kinda the point of the Cerulean Sweater monologue. The idea is that, in a hyper-capitalist society, we don’t really make our own decisions. And if you buy everything from a publicly traded retailer, that’s probably true. But those of us who operate at the highest levels of taste and personal style do make our own decisions. I did. I decided to wear jeans. And so did all of the cool people I know and follow. These synchronized independent decisions comprise fashion’s collective consciousness.
Obviously jeans have been directly associated with cool since the beginning, or at least since the 1950s or so. I don’t know, I’m not a historian. “Jeans are cool now” is a risky take, one that even I wouldn’t attempt to make. But jeans are certainly surging, and increasingly, I’m noticing that they are replacing the “fun pants” that have dominated for the last few years. When you consider the evolution of menswear over the last decade or so, this is actually quite a remarkable turn of events. Or it’s the most obvious thing to happen right now. Depends on how you look at it.
Once upon a time, you could only get a fashionable pair of wide pleated trousers from Comme des Garçons or Armani. They weren’t broadly considered cool, and only the bravest and most dedicated outfit aficionados wore them. Now you can get a pair at Zara (probably, I’m not going to check). If one word could summarize the last decade or so of men’s style, it would be “pants.” The prestigious New York Times Magazine put pants on the cover—a great story, ICYMI, by Blackbird Spyplane co-chief Jonah Weiner.
