On Being a Hypebeast For Pants

Preface: This newsletter is a bit of a stream of consciousness brain-dump that I didn’t edit down. These are some thoughts that have been kicking around in my head for kind of a while at this point, and I needed to get them down into print so that I could empty my conscious of them. Apologies for the rambling, but I think you guys will like the sentiment nonetheless!

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Do you ever look back on how far we’ve come as menswear connoisseurs? Harkening back to the old days of Bape, Supreme drops, and Jordan sneakers actually being cool makes me feel like I’m hundreds of years old.

As our generation (the very young millennial/older genZ cohort, that is) has continued to age, all of the goofy hypebeast flavor has fallen away in favor of more mundane menswear-inspired fits (and that’s a good thing!). Fit, material, construction, and proportions are the cool things to play with nowadays.

Unless I’m just old and ignorant now, it seems like fewer and fewer brands are able to instantly sell out like they could in the olden days. The hype is too granular, the market’s oversaturated with brands that appeal to smaller and smaller niches…

Does branding still matter? Yes of course, but current trends point to affordable classics like the Adidas Samba instead of the Jordan 6 infrared that sold out immediately thanks to shoe bots and sneaker resellers. Again, this is a good thing! What a silly culture that was — a sneaker that cost $13 to produce in Bangladesh, coated with the thinnest possible veneer of “leather“, reselling for $500+ on eBay.

So many goobers got rich botting sneakers back in the day — I wonder what they’re up to now…

(probably crypto scamcoins)

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The explosion of brands like Noah and Aime Leon Dore a couple of years ago coincided with the last breath of hypebeast culture. Frankly, we’re too old to dress like this now.

Noah specifically is a good case study here — if you’re unfamiliar, it’s a brand started by Brendon Babenzien, the former creative director of Supreme. The brand itself has lost some steam over the last year, in large part because of Babenzien’s appointment as the creative director of J. Crew’s menswear line.

Even the guys who were responsible for creating all that hype back in the day have decided to hang it up in favor of perfecting the fit of a good old oxford cloth button down.

listed for $3500 on eBay

Like can you imagine seeing someone wearing this Louis Vuitton x Supreme hoodie in public today? Such a person is so clearly a Victim of the Times, and it would be difficult to not feel a little embarrassed on their behalf.

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But back to that paragraph about the hype guys trading it all in for collar rolls and locker loops — we all (again, young millennials/elder genZ) are kind of doing the same thing. Some of us are lost and attaching that hype elsewhere, while others have relented and made their own version of the menswear uniform.

A good example of what I mean here (absolutely no hate to Jake Woolf, he makes great content): you can buy Wolverine 1000 miles, which are 99% the same as these RRL captoes (above), for literally $700 less.

Opting for the RRL boots here is a vestige of our dying hype-brain zeitgeist. Just being able to say it’s RRL is worth the extra $700 to many…

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Here is a good spot to point out that I’m not exempt from this train of thought either. Right now, I’m directing my own personal brand of hype toward owning a bunch of cool pants (not just jeans, either — I think my coolest pair is some patchwork madras pants from J. Press).

Pants are often the most slept-on piece of the menswear puzzle, but can absolutely make or break a fit. The guys over at Jack Donnelly understand this and are committed to making some of the best pants in the biz.

I’m not really a “black jeans”, or even a raw/selvedge kind of guy — my experience with raw denim has been mostly negative if I’m being honest. My last real attempt with raws were a pair from 3sixteen that were so low-rise and so uncomfortably tight in the top block (despite over a month of trying to loosen them up), that I pretty much gave up on really nice jeans altogether.

Additionally, my whole online presence is geared toward a more ivy/prep menswear influence, so not having needlessly fancy jeans wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Still, I saw these and immediately wanted to try them out. After all, a little versatility can’t hurt, can it?

I picked up their latest release, a pair of 13.5 oz black selvedge denim from Nihon Menpu in Japan. Retail on these is $225. If you ever bought into the raw denim hype (which still has a really strong community by the way), you’d know that this is actually a pretty good price for what you’re getting:

Made in USA, drill cloth pockets, raw copper hardware, and a 2 over 1 twill weave makes for some top-tier jeans. A cursory google search for other pants using Nihon Menpu denim will return eye-watering prices as high as $450. These are genuine collector’s-tier jeans for a very reasonable price.

Copper hardware and selvedge ID

Day 1, immediately out of the package

Here’s a video of me struggling to move around in them right out of the box lol

If you’re familiar with selvedge or raw denim, you’ll know that there’s a pretty extensive break-in process associated with these types of jeans. I’m on day 3 of the break-in process and the waist has loosened up significantly, which in my experience is pretty quick for selvedge stuff. Just need the thighs to loosen up slightly and we’ll be in business.

Styling

My immediate thought for a black-jeans-but-still-elevated fit was this alpine joint from the James Bond movie Spectre (2015). Paired with some retro hikers (The Danner mountain light here) and one of those hybrid puffer jacket things is a pretty hard fit for the winter time.

Those hybrid puffers are wildly hard to track down, by the way. It seems that there’s 3 big players here:

• Moncler cardigans - $1300

• Canada Goose HyBridge - $695

• Ralph Lauren Purple Label Hybrid Sweater - $895

All of these cost a fortune sadly, which means I won’t be buying one. Polo Ralph Lauren and their golf line RLX also make something similar, but it’s not quite the same.

Otherwise, I think you could swap out the hikers for some black Red Wing moc toes, or even wear them with a pair of penny loafers or tassel loafers if you’re feeling extra brave.

I also think a pair of broken-in black jeans go really well with a peacock-y overcoat like a duffle coat, polo coat, or balmacaan. They allow the coat to speak for itself without drawing attention away from it.

At any rate, I like the monochrome fits here, and black jeans just work so much better than black chinos in my opinion.

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