There’s No Accounting for Taste

Critiquing the NYT “pants” story and the futility of trend reporting

Last Sunday, the New York Times magazine published a massive cover story about pants. Yes, pants. Those fraught tubes we slip our legs into each morning, it posits, appear to be the source of rising mental anguish as people ponder the correct width of pants they “should'' be wearing. The story was written by Jonah Weiner, the author of brilliant, hilarious, zeitgeist-defining fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, and contains several incredible banger lines notably: “Jeans, a kind of Patient Zero for pants trends, showed symptoms of acute-onset elephantiasis,” and “You could drop Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp into a circa-2024 fashion mood board pretty readily.” It’s an entertaining deep dive on a question that has taken up outsized space in the fashion discourse since 2019, making the story feel slightly passé and authoritative at the same time. (Although forgivable since the author acknowledges the long-running nature of the dialogue.) But ultimately I closed the tab feeling unsatisfied, for a variety of reasons that I think necessitate a State of the Union addressing the declining state of trend reporting.

First off, the story spends a great deal of column inches beefing up the argument that pants are “important” enough to write about in the first place. This is something perhaps the average reader of the NYT magazine needs to be convinced of, but it also walks right into the trap that befalls most mainstream fashion journalism, which is explaining its right to exist. The more a writer kowtows to the lowest common denominator in the audience, the less insightful their work gets. Editors should know this too. After all, if you’re commissioning a story, you’ve already implicitly agreed it’s important, so why not just accept that as a given and let the writer find something actually interesting to say?

The main issue I have with the story though, is that it does not provide a satisfying resolution to the question it purports to answer: “What the latest swing from skinny to wide tells us about ourselves.” The story brilliantly charts the incontrovertible rise of the wide-leg pants through the stylistic preferences of Barack Obama, and suggests that big pants achieved supremacy when normally milquetoast retailer J. Crew introduced “giant-fit chinos.” The story may have communicated how we got to this moment in time but did not, as it promised, answer why. Instead, “The best we can do is argue.”

He did however, manage to get in a dig at the 2021 op-ed I wrote for the New York Times titled “There are No Fashion Rules Anymore.” Weiner writes:

“Wear whatever you like” has long struck me as up there with “be yourself” when it comes to useless style advice, as if your personal style didn’t always contain some irreducible level of dialogue with the tastes, prerogatives and opinions of others — as if taste were something that could ever take the form of pure monologue. 

Useless style advice! Well, it’s an honour just to be nominated, sir. I could say that it ignores the underlying argument of the piece, which is that people should take time to develop their personal tastes, figure out what they like and go from there. But I am willing to admit that “wear what you want” doesn’t quite resonate the same way today as it did in 2021. When I wrote that story, the pandemic was still in full swing and in the wake of so much upheaval and confusion, it felt like the best thing you could do is abandon all sense of hierarchy and go with the flow. However, I can also acknowledge that “wear what you want” is only practical advice for the 0.003% of the population who have actual taste. People who don’t have taste will always want to be told what to wear, and people who do have never really needed that advice, because they just wear what they want anyways.

On the whole, I think this story does a good job of demonstrating the increasing futility of trend reporting. Weiner writes that pants trends are more stable than other microtrends because, “Once you find a style you like — or once you acquiesce to the style you’re supposed to like and then hope your perception adjusts accordingly — it’s reasonable to want to drop anchor.” I think this applies to any item of clothing, not specifically pants, and is related to the aforementioned discussion of taste. The reason why skinny jeans reigned supreme for 15 years is because most people just don’t want to think about style too much, and the ones who do are relatively comfortable switching back and forth between styles with abandon.

The longer I write about trends, the more I accept that no fashion trend can actually “tell us more about ourselves.” Humans are fickle and there’s really no direct reason why people are drawn to things. It’s certainly fun to theorize and come up with erudite-sounding explanations that flex our own intelligence, but none of it is technically true. 

I’m not even convinced people are really that confused about pants in the first place. Most people are busy wearing what they want (sorry) and anyone who is confused is putting too much stock in fashion media. If there’s a reason why people are confused right now it’s because there’s been a breakdown in the authority of people delivering the instructions. Most of the cultural objects people engage with on a daily basis are spoon fed to them, and at the moment, every 16-year-old on TikTok is putting on a falsely authorial tone of expertise. The only way to avoid bad advice is to cultivate the ability to like things independent of discourse, or the “irreducible level of dialogue,” Weiner names. So not exactly “wear what you want,” but perhaps, “get some taste.”

Though while performing my nightly scroll through beautiful objects on my phone last evening, I came across a pair of pants that stopped me in my tracks.

Not going to lie, I’m considering them.