There is a hell, and it is full of elastic waist pants.
Sponsored by The Big Belt & Standardized Trouser Association of America.
Much like The Masked Singer, today is all about unveiling my truth. The story begins in early February when friend and fellow writer Delia Cai (of the immensely more popular Deez Links) announced that she would be doing a second season of her capsule “Hate Read” series. Here's the gist for those who are scandalously unaware of these essays. An anonymous crop of writers each dip their metaphorical pen into literal blood to write screeds on something they hate with a fiery passion. The first season was such a viral hit that the reading party at The River got a write-up in the New York Times. I was not there, but I imagine it was a very “Masked Singer for the irony-pilled” kind of affair.
A year passed, and then, miraculously, Delia returned with a pitch call for a fresh round of hate. It was like seeing Batman respond to the soft glow of his logo reflected on a cloud via a floodlight; it was giving “2 Hater 2 Quit” or something. Two days later, I started dropping hints that I wanted to pitch. Casual stuff like texting, “trying to think of a hate read to pitch you,” and “the toddlercoreification of dressing is my 13th reason.” I’m sure you can see where this is going. I pitched, I wrote, I responded to edits, and last week, my Hate Read was published. The topic (as you may have guessed) is the scourge of elasticated waistbands. The response was almost as angry as if I’d personally come to the peoples' houses to burn their stretchy pants with my own two dainty little hands.
“Maybe if your chinos weren't so stiff, you wouldn't be seething like this,” wrote one Substacker, with another asking, “Why not be comfortable for your Mary Oliver-termed one and precious life?” Yet another person said, “It's giving size 2,” which I will be taking as a compliment. First of all, I do not wear chinos (much less stiff ones). Second, and more importantly, invoking Mary Oliver to justify wearing lazy, elasticated pants is so Tumblrmaxxing it feels like a sentient Live Laugh Love crochet pillow found its way onto the Deez Links comment section. Go ahead and live your life, girl, but if you can use this legendary poet as a crutch to justify your wardrobe, I can just as easily say I’m using my Mary Oliver-termed one and precious life to be a professional hater.
Before we dig into this very special syndication of my Hate Read essay, I would like to just preemptively say one last thing because (1) the commentators on the original essay were MAD mad, and (2) media literacy is actually on its last rattling breath:
You can wear whatever pants you like, and you can wear whatever clothing makes you feel good. This is a humorous cultural critique, so please chill.
Welcome to Public Service.
“They are juvenile, they are an eyesore, and above all, they are nasty.”
Note: This essay originally appeared in Hate Read Season 2, which is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation.
Sometime in recent history, humanity hurtled into a terrible new epoch that, spurred on by the pandemic, is currently still wreaking havoc upon our moral fabric. I speak not of climate catastrophe or the rise of fascism, but of… elastic waist pants. Specifically, I am talking about the cultural embrace of elastic waistbands in what I would categorize as “outside pants:” The kind of pants you’d wear to the office or to a cafe. I’m talking about the quiet horror of noticing dress pants or jeans and realizing, slowly and then all at once, the unmistakable scrunch of elastic at the waist.
Again, to be clear so as not to be canceled, my ire is not directed at sweatpants, workout pants, pajamas, or any other type of lower-bodied garment you’d wear in the comfort of your own home or within the confines of a gym (though honestly, please do not ever wear sweatpants in public, I beg). I am also not targeting maternity wear or embarking on a fatphobic tirade. I’m fully aware of the benefits of an elastic waist on pants, but I am equally aware of the fact that history is full of people of all sizes wearing pants that do not share the design philosophy of toddler clothing.
I hate elasticated waistbands in pants with a white-hot intensity because of the laziness of it all. I’ve been keeping notes on what people wear since I was an adolescent, quietly seething at the number of people whose sense of dress never evolved beyond what they wore as children. Call me sartorially precocious or simply just a psychopath who won “Best Dressed” their senior year of high school and thus maintains the authority to look down on everyone, but is it so bad to want people to dress well? Unfortunately for the state of human dressing and therefore also for me, what had always been a gurgling stream of distress has since become a raging torrent in the last few years, first, with the proliferation of “athleisure,” and finally, like a dam bursting, when the pandemic ushered in the plague of “casual workwear.”
In those early months, when the world shut down and we retreated inside, the sale of pajamas increased 143 percent, fashion retailers created product categories like “Perfect Zoom Tops,” and everyone got cozy — too cozy. Like a flaccid old elastic waistband doomed to never return to full tautness, society entered its “cozycore home-office-maxxing” era and never quite found its way back.
The material isn’t new, of course: A British tailor named Alexander Simpson added adjustable rubber waistbands to men’s trousers in 1934, and DuPont Company chemist Dr. Joseph Shivers invented Lycra spandex in 1958. What is new, however, is the mass delusion that we ought to keep wearing pants in public that share the same design element as the sweatpants we wear at home to shuffle from bed to the bathroom. Whenever I spot a scrunched waistband in the outside world, I have to grab onto something. My vision blurs, my pulse quickens, and I experience vivid PTSD flashbacks of two years spent toiling away at a GAP that had a baby and kids section, both of which were the domain of the stretchy pants.
Pop quiz: Why do babies and kids need pants that have elastic at the waist? Because they crawl on the ground and shit themselves. Please, someone, anyone, I beg you to tell me why fully grown, sentient adults are happily wearing pants evocative of literal potty training?? Enough is enough. I understand that sitting inside our homes for two years did irreparable psychic damage to us all, but we need to leave the nasty fake dress pants with the stretchy waistbands in the past. At least until the bird flu and/or that asteroid arrives to wipe us out. Have some self-respect, or at least a modicum of discipline.
I wanted to write all this while sipping a glass of wine in my comfy pants, but there was too much rage; the odds of clenching my hand so tightly that I might shatter the glass were too high. Though, at least I would then have a shard of glass available to gouge my own eyes out to avoid the sight of these diabolical garments. I can only hope that by doing my patriotic duty to try and steer the sartorial ship out of these choppy waters, history will remember me as noble for taking such a bold stand. I urge you one final time to set aside these blasphemous, elasticated relics.
They are juvenile, they are an eyesore, and above all, they are nasty.
— Reynolds Woodcock
This essay is sponsored by the Big Belt & Standardized Trouser Association of America.