Dear Hard Pants: I Miss You
As long as the internet has existed, so have the jokes about the freedom of taking your bra off at the end of the day. Same goes with our assessment of people who wear jeans at home (psychopaths, apparently). Never mind that for decades jeans were one of the few ways women could circumvent outside norms about their appearance and simply wear something comfortable and practical. My, how the turn tables.
That woman is grilling meat! And there’s not even a man there to supervise the flame!
Clothing and adornment says as much about the society in which it rises to prominence as it does about the cultural and artistic influences involved. The opulence and hedonism of 1920s fashion was as much of a reaction to the grim terror of the Great War and the 1918 Flu Pandemic as it was a breaking away from the stuffy Victorian and then Edwardian dress and social mores that proceeded it.
If fashion is a product of its time, then 2020 and 2021 have shown us that when the world forcibly separates us from the most ancient sources of comfort - our families, our friends, our favorite coffee shop, we turn to comfort in our clothing.
Even before the panorama, casual chic was already on the rise, thanks to the monumental ascent of athleisure and comfy-pretty brands like Sleeper. Gone are the days when hitting rock bottom meant wearing your most embarrassing Cookie Monster PJ pants to the grocery store. Now, feathered silk pajamas are the height of chic.
With the Internet, fashion lost much of its monolithic quality, and yet it’s undeniable: we’re all migrating closer and closer to casual. One of the most effortlessly chic women in the world, Chiara Ferragni (Italian influencer and founder of The Blonde Salad) spent most of quarantine looking suspiciously like I did when I was a camp counselor circa 2009 (tie-dye shirt, cutoff shorts, layered bracelets, Birkenstocks, and all). Granted, Ferragni is 6 inches taller and 6 shades more tanned than I will ever be. Even Nicki Minaj, queen of red carpet excess, made an art-directed appearance in Crocs in 2021.
I would never dictate what another person should or should not wear, and I think the epic diversity of our taste is one of the greatest gifts humanity has to offer to art and appearance. But I must state for the record: I am tired of comfortable clothes. I miss my hard pants.
Maybe it makes me a psychopath, maybe it makes me a tool of toxic masculinity, but damnit I love to dress up. Happiness researchers think you should try to match your behavior to the mood you want, rather than the one you have. For me, that means expressing my creativity through clothing.
Wearing a fabulous outfit makes me feel like a knight entering battle. My posture improves, I become more articulate, more thoughtful, more confident. I am hopelessly clumsy and yet even if I trip, wearing heels brings out my most primal Amazon warrior side in a way that my ultraboosts cannot.
Last night, I stayed up feverishly saving sky-high Louboutin pumps to my wishlist on The Real Real, and trying to decode which Carolina Herrera gowns might actually fit around my chest (a 30” bust is not a large, y’all!!!). I recently re-devoured Sex and the City in all it’s campy, cringey, inexplicable glory, awash in the glow of tulle skirts and 40 pound earrings (RIP Kim Cattrall’s ear lobes) and the shoe envy is real.
Someone get this woman a neck brace.
The problem is, how do I reconcile my love of dressing up with the realities of my day-to-day life? Outside of highly-curated Instagram feeds, where does one wear a gown? When social events are a sea of bike shorts and thrasher tees, how does one show off their favorite vintage sundress without feeling like Daisy Mae?
I’m an enneagram 4, so I thrive on being different. On a recent outing to brunch on a drizzly day, I reveled in the way my flamingo blazer soared amidst a sea of pea-green Patagonia. Surely part of this is due to the fact that in Denver, everyone dresses like they could go kayaking at any moment (restaurant jacket rules be damned). But when is too much, too much? And more to the point, when my job is now permanently work from home, how do I balance feeling amazing with dressing practically?
I spent a sizable chunk of my early adulthood working for a high-end lingerie store with high standards of appropriate dress. I rarely wore pants, I accessorized every day, and I took genuine care in my appearance. Sure, some (hungover) days I’d long to be able to roll up in sweat pants, but for every day like that, I had 10 where I felt fabulous and chic, where I felt I could hold my head high. As we emerge from this dark and scary time, is dressing up a relic of the past reserved for the Met Gala, the Bachelor franchise, and prom? Is everyone but Zendaya and Billy Porter destined for a life of shapeless prairie dresses and sturdy platform sandals as the absolute height of formal?
I’m only human. Some days a man’s undershirt, leggings, and Chacos are the best I can do. I love hiking and camping, in which case my REI fleece and my mid-rise hiking boots are my most trusty companions. But in general, damnit, I really miss hard pants.
