From remote worker to 'roadman': the rise, fall and reluctant defence of sweatpants

It was Karl Lagerfeld who said that, to paraphrase, a man who wears sweatpants is a man who has given up on life.

If a garment can embody such philosophy, the French designer’s idea is simple: that the soft and sloppy, pull-on/pull-down nature of sweatpants — ideal, as some young men seem to enjoy, for stuffing their hands down the front while standing at a bus-stop — embodies zero effort and, as a consequence, zero style.

“Sweatpants have no structure, no line, no elegance - they’re lazy even for sports clothing,” says the designer Oliver Spencer.

“Sure, they’re very comfortable and are OK on the way to the gym, or nipping out on a Sunday morning. For that, they’re a brilliant bit of kit. But that’s where it stops. I argue with my kids about them. They just moan back at me that I don’t get it”.

Certainly, sweatpants have come to define the go-to look of many a British teen boy, tarnished as it is, arguably, by the thin, pale grey polyester sweat suit that defines 'roadman' style, worn as a kind of alternative onesie.

And, points out smart menswear industry veteran and personal stylist Chris Modoo, similarly cosy. “Menswear was softening well before Covid, but you can see how lockdown, and then remote working, accelerated the wearing of a softer, more accessible way of dressing,” he says.

“In fact, sweatpants are so accessible — and so everywhere — they’ve become a kind of anti-fashion”.

Accessible too because they’re eminently affordable — which, he contends, may be democratic but means that so many wearers tend to look as cheap as their sweatpants. The popularity of sweatpants may have grown out of 'athleisure' — the wearing of sportswear as casualwear, again for its comfort and utility — but now it’s come to embody what he calls “slobwear”, the semi-disposable choice of trousers for decorators and construction site workers.

Remarkably, some research suggests that declining interest in buying jeans may be in part because the market has peaked (many of us have all the jeans we’ll ever need) but also because they’ve been overshadowed by sweatpants as the key to the new everyman attire.

The difference? While jeans have a deep cultural heritage to reference, sweatpants? Well, less so… This perhaps explains the US clothing company Rag & Bone recently launching a pair of sweatpants disguised to look like jeans — that’s how addicted we’ve become to what gets marketed as ‘loungewear’.

How sweatpants took over Britain

This is not in itself a new idea. Both Spencer and Modoo recall wearing track pants themselves as boys — but these were the boldly-coloured, silky-smooth style of 80s Casuals and early hip hop, valued for their comfort, yes, but also for their aesthetic —and, unlike today’s supermarket sweatpants, sometimes for their rarity too. As Spencer puts it: “It was hard to beat an Adidas Three Stripe track pant, but wearing it was never about being slapdash or untidy, quite the opposite”.

Indeed, through history there have been wearers of the more traditional sweatpant — or jogging bottoms, as they’re sometimes still called in the UK — who have shown another way with them: the likes of Sly Stallone’s Rocky Bilboa, for example, John Travolta’s Danny Zuko in Grease, or perennial style icon Steve McQueen. What makes their way any different?

According to Oliver Spencer, it’s a question of fabric: it’s heavyweight, plain — navy, black or traditional grey marl — and 100% cotton, as befits the post-war, 1950s American collegiate style that first really drove the popularity of the sweatpant, for sport at least. That’s even if the garments had been invented some 30 years before by a Frenchman, Emile Camuset, the founder of Le Coq Sportif.

“But even Steve McQueen in sweatpants? I still don’t need to look like that,” Spencer laughs.

“That’s a very different proposition to Steve McQueen in a sweatshirt. I can’t explain why, but a sweatshirt always looks good — as an alternative to knitwear — in the way sweatpants rarely do”.

But this isn’t to altogether do away with sweatpants outside of exercise, watching Sunday afternoon TV or nipping to the corner shop. And this is not to encourage the wearing of more tailored sweatpants either — akin to the more streamlined, sometimes even centre-creased or pleated versions that, for a while, fashion attempted to persuade men that were an acceptable, professional alternative to going full slob. “Yeah, we tried doing a more tailored, a more structured sweatpant, and it just didn’t work for us,” concedes Spencer. “Essentially, sweatpants just can’t help draping in that sloppy way. There’s no getting around it”.

Can sweatpants ever look smart?

Instead, Modoo argues that the secret is to wear sweatpants with absolute polish. “It has to look considered,” he argues.

“You have to look utterly fresh, clean and well-groomed. Then a pair of sweatpants can look smarter than the guy into the sack of a suit. If we live in a world now in which billionaires and normal blokes both wear the same sweatpants, what distinguishes one from the other is the attention paid to everything that goes around them”.

Getting that right could really matter. Check out conversations on Reddit about wearing sweatpants without consideration and comments nod to concerns about “looking unemployed” through to the fact that they’re something that is “hard to impress the ladies wearing”. Especially if you’re Eva Mendes. She once only half-joked that men wearing sweatpants was the number one cause for divorce. Perhaps this explains why husband Ryan Gosling has only been papped wearing them at the gym or walking the dog.

“Again with the sweatpants?” as Seinfeld famously asks George in one episode. “You know the message you’re sending out to the world with those sweatpants? It’s ‘I can’t compete in normal society. I’m miserable. So I might as well be comfortable’.”

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