Over the last few years, in otherwise unassuming locales all across this nation—boardrooms and fast-casual eateries, airport lounges and sports-bar patios—a sinister force has emerged. They’re a genus of tapered 5-pocket trousers designed to look like your run-of-the-mill khakis or chinos, but are actually made from a synthetic performance material—the kind designed for use in a yoga class, with four-way stretch and moisture wicking properties. Post-pandemic, these tech pants have become the de facto bottoms of a certain cross section of young, upwardly-mobile urban professionals. (On a recent commute, one GQ editor clocked five near-identical pairs of light-gray tech pants on a single subway car.) They’re the new fleece vest, Allbirds for your legs, a symbol of middle-class corporate homogeneity.
Allow me to make my feelings about tech pants crystal clear: Fuck ’em.
With their slippery polyblend fabrics and childish elastic waistbands, tech pants are a damning symptom of our society’s obsession with putting comfort and efficiency above all else. They are the Soylent of clothing, draining all the romance and character from an outfit, a facsimile of a real garment that. They are serviceable but insipid. We are in the midst of a Golden Age of thoughtful, cool pants, with more stylish options than ever—tapered, pleated, baggy, double-knee, cropped, you name it—available to express yourself. And yet, so many of our men are choosing to wear yoga pants dressed up as chinos. It feels akin to the tech world’s ongoing quest to smooth away the “friction” from any interaction, to optimize everything with mind-numbing effortlessness, leaching all the character from life in the process.
Perhaps most importantly, tech pants don’t even really deliver on their purported benefits. Are they that much more comfortable than a nice pair of cotton twill trousers? Are they more breathable than linen? I have, for research, worn a fair share of tech pants from a wide variety of brands, and I actually find their synthetic fabrics unnerving in their robotically smooth, flat appearance. It’s not a benefit that they never wrinkle and can stretch to match my every movement; it’s proof of their alien-like composition. They feel fake and plasticky—after all, the nylons and polyesters they’re so often crafted from are fake and plastic. A few hours in a pair and I am aching for the flesh-and-blood feel of a natural fibre like wool (which, by the way, happens to breathe wonderfully and is inherently water and odor resistant).
Are regular waistbands really so constricting you need to replace them with elastic? If so, you may need to consider the size of the pants you’re wearing. And what you get for that stretchy waist is a silhouette that is sort of runny, always a little limp. Tech pants do not seem to be designed by a human, but rather vaguely shaped by data points, slick and blandly inoffensive. Ultimately they read as an appeal to the lowest common denominator, a mass-made solution for a made-up problem .
Nor have I ever been fooled by a pair of tech pants—I see right through their claim of sartorial verisimilitude. There’s an innate withering flaccidity to their material. There’s none of the verve or dynamism of a hearty cotton or the elegant drape of a nice wool gabardine. No, when I see a pair of tech pants in the wild (which I do, much more often than I’d like) I know exactly what you’re wearing.
It’s a good thing to have clothes made with different purposes. I do not need gym clothes masquerading as work clothes. I need gym clothes that function for their intended use: to make it easier and more comfortable for me to exercise. But for work clothes, I want garments that will carry me through a day at the office. Suits may no longer be de rigeur in professional settings, but do we really need clothes with “moisture wicking” technology to sit at our desks and answer emails? When you have clothes that are trying to be two things at once, they almost always fail to deliver on both fronts.
Maybe my cries are falling on deaf ears. I recently spoke with a market analyst who said this type of clothing—which he called “active casual,” an evolution of the pure “active” category—was poised for future growth. Maybe the pandemic unleashed a genie that we will never put back in the bottle. Or maybe, like anything else, the pendulum will swing back, and a new generation of young men will discover the joys of real, hardwearing, stretch-free pants once again.
