After the first day of sixth grade my Mom, Dad, brother and I went to the mall to get school supplies. Most of my list could be found in the school supply section at Target, but I also needed black shorts for gym. My mom and I decided we would go to Target and get all items for class and my Dad and brother would go to the sporting goods store for shorts. I didn’t want my Dad picking out folders, pencils, ect. that I would be using in class and thought he could handle buying a pair of black gym shorts. I was wrong. When we met back up I asked my father if he found some. He said yes and assured me that they were the best option in the store but strangely refused to show them to me. I didn’t see the shorts until the next day. My dad bought me thin, cloth, above the knee shorts with a white elastic waistband. This was year 2000. A time after Michael Jordan and the Fab 5 had lengthened shorts to at least mid knee and before Jay-Z and Kanye slimmed down street wear to look more grown up and less ghetto. I don’t know where he found these shorts in a prominent sporting good store at the time. I would have fit in more with my classmates if the bottom of the shorts came down to the top of my shoes.
The mistake of letting my dad pick out my clothes was one I could have easily dodged. He had a long history of suppressing any coolness from my brother and I’s wardrobe. For some reason he always purposely dressed us in the opposite of the latest trend ie wouldn’t let us wear over the shoes baseball pants, bought us adidas dad shoes, wouldn’t let me change out a bright red face mask on my football helmet. I mention this because I think it’s a major problem in sports, the ‘old school’ coaches, parents, organizations make young athletes uncomfortable for being themselves and have destroyed the careers of countless prospects. But that’s a discussion for another time.
I eventually saved my money, bought new shorts and conquered the social construct of the 6th grade.
My new shorts caused relentlessly mocking by my classmates. They even separated me from the friends I had in elementary school and detering me from meeting new friends from other elementary schools. Out of principal and his goal of making his kids uncool, my dad didn’t buy me new shorts. I eventually saved my money, bought new shorts and conquered the social construct of the 6th grade.
In 2019, I ironically spend the majority of my time in cloth, above the knee shorts. I would look ridiculous wearing the long baggy shorts that I bought to save my social life 19 years ago. I’m sure you have heard the phrases ‘ everything comes back in style’ and ‘fashion is full circle.’ Is this true? Obviously it isn’t totally true or powdered wigs would have made a come back. With shorts, technically, this is true, but the shorts I’m wearing now are much different. They are made from high quality fabric, tapered, and branded. They are closer to the shorts my Dad picked out than the below the knee shorts I preferred at the time, but my dad probably wouldn’t have chosen these either. Fashion doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Shout out to Mark Twain. My prediction for the 2020s is baggy but it will look much different than the 90s and early 2000s.
I think fashion, more specifically modern street fashion, comes from three main factors. Hip hop, skateboarding, and Japan. All three have a huge impact on America and they all influence each other. As a skateboarding, hip hop fan that lives in Portland and just got back from Japan, I will double down on my prediction of baggy clothes coming back. Skinny jeans are already scarce on the West Coast. In Japan, the young, fashion forward individuals I came across were all wearing loose clothes. However, the baggy revolution is looking different than Lil Wayne’s Carter 2 era pants. While pants are getting baggier, they are also getting shorter. My two favorite skate style icons are Tristian Funkhouser (@tfunk) and Victoria Taylor (@skatemoss), both sport the baggy high water look nicely and have been doing so for years. Fashion rappers like Kanye West, Asap Rocky, and Tyler the Creator have more recently adopted the trend.
Tfunk
The shift in hip hop fascinates me the most. In the 1980s hip hop’s founders like Grandmaster Flash, The Beastie Boys, and Run DMC all wore tight pants. The next generation rebelled and wore oversized clothes. See Nas, Tupac, Jay-Z, Eminem in the 1990s/early 2000s. Hip hop’s undisputed(in my opinion) GOAT Jay-Z, then took it upon himself to take the culture out of the gang-related baggy clothing trend to more respectable clothes that actually fit. ‘And I don’t wear jerseys, I’m 30-plus, give me a crisp pair of jeans, nigga, button-ups.’ Then Jay-Z’s apprentice, Kanye West completely destroyed the trend. The entire culture switched over, but not immediately. The hood rappers stuck to their oversized pants for a few years but soon adopted sagging skinnies with a designer belt. Today, as baggy or at least looser fitting pants takes hold of hip hop/American culture (they are the same) the Gucci belt wearing hood dudes with cash stuffed in their pockets are the ones resisting the new trend. Exploding head emoji.
Fashion rap embracing the baggy high water trend from skateboarding
All trends aren’t worth of making a come back and some trends that do come back would have been better off dying out. Usually when a trend comes back it ends up on the other side of the spectrum. For example, the hipsters riding double decker tandem bicycles around Portland with handlebar mustaches are mostly left wing white collar workers. Their look is a take on the WWII era working class man’s man. The fanny pack has been hijacked from the dad’s of 1980s by hypebeasts of today only worn across their body and not around the waist. There was an unreal amount of side bags/fanny packs in Tokyo worn by hypebeasts of all shades. Hip hop jewelry has taken an interesting turn as of lately. 1980s rappers and drug dealers sported oversized gold chains, bracelets, and watches. In the late 90s platinum took over and the chain of necklaces grew to an extremely costly length. Then gold came back and the chain length shrunk back down in the 2010s. Chains have gotten increasingly short and now Soundcloud rappers are wearing full on gothic chokers made of precious metals. If someone would have told me rappers would one day be dressing like the goth kids at my middle school, I would have laughed at them.
While fashion will always interest me, now that I'm 30+ (barely) keeping up with the kids doesn't top my list of priorities. So as long as girls keep embracing their curves and pancake booty doesn't make a come back, I'll be alright. If I could go back and give advice to my past self, who was getting ridiculed for wearing shorts from the 1970s, I would just buy him some big ass Nike shorts that everyone else is wearing. Maybe tell him that one day the shorts you are wearing will come back in style, but that woudln't do him any good. It's an unfathomable concept in the present because the trend won't fully come back, rather it will reammerge in a rhyming manner.