Common Thugs - T Magazine Blog
Photography by Matthew Kristall
We cut streetwear some slack. View the full shoot.
“Stop the Sag,” the fitful campaign by the New York State Senator Eric Adams to banish drooping, rump-revealing men’s pants, had about it an adorably vestigial quality, like a ban on boomboxes in the subway. “This whole sagging pants culture seems to have swept the city and the country,” the Brooklyn Democrat said in March, as if awakening from a 20-year sleep. Saggy pants have been popular since at least 1988, when Eazy-E of N.W.A. joked that he wore his jeans low “fo’ Eazy access, baby.” (The style’s real history is a bit more complicated.)
As simple as it is to dismiss Adams’s campaign as passé, there is some evidence of a slouchy pant resurgence. Take a look at the spring runways, where Givenchy, Dior Homme, Yves Saint-Laurent and others rebooted low-hanging pants and other streetwear staples. We saw the standard-issue sweatshirt deconstructed (Alexander Wang, Calvin Klein) and the basketball jersey reimagined as a mesh cashmere tank (Prada). Yes, there was something muddled about the urban allusions here, which recalled Clichy-sous-Bois as readily as Compton. Sadly for Senator Adams, this latest expression of loose-fitting street spirit only makes his efforts seem more uptight.
